Table of Contents
Volume 53, Number 11 · June 22, 2006
Freeman Dyson, Religion from the Outside 
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett
Elizabeth Drew, Power Grab
Charles Simic, The Power of Ruins
Averno by Louise Glück
Neal Ascherson, The Writer and the Tyrant
You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka
Mark Strand, People Walking through the Night (poem)
Ahmed Rashid, Afghanistan: On the Brink
Afghanistan's Uncertain Transition from Turmoil to Normalcy a report by Barnett R. Rubin
Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Frank Kermode, Lives of Dr. Johnson
Johnson on the English Language: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume XVIII edited by Gwin J. Kolb and Robert Demaria Jr.
Samuel Johnson's Unpublished Revisions to the Dictionary of the English Language: A Facsimile Edition edited by Allen Reddick
Anniversary Essays on Johnson's Dictionary edited by Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott
Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791 by Freya Johnston
Loving Dr. Johnson by Helen Deutsch
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings
The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson, edited by Roger Lonsdale
Ronald Steel, All You Need Is Love
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin
Orlando Figes, Anna the Great
Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein
Linda Colley, The Sea Around Us
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours by Bernard Bailyn
The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 by Carla Gardina Pestana
Alan Ryan, Cosmopolitans
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen
Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership by Martha C. Nussbaum
William H. McNeill, Watch on the Rhine
The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn
Amos Elon, What Does Olmert Want?
The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 by Gershom Gorenberg
Willibald Sauerländer, The Novelist in the Gallery
Still Looking: Essays on American Art by John Updike
Letters
Clare Asquith, Anne Barton, 'The One and Only'
Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance (HAMSA), Ahdaf Soueif, In Tora Prison
Steven Burch, George H. Thomson, Queries
Contributors
Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is the editor of the journal Public Archaeology at University College London. (November 2008)
Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. (July 2008)
Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of twelve books.
Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.
Dyson's books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Amos Elon's most recent book is The Pity of It All: German Jews Before Hitler. He is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU. (February 2008)
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London University. His new book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, will be published this month. (November 2007)
Frank Kermode lives in Cambridge, England. His most recent book is The Age of Shakespeare. (October 2008)
William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and A Boyhood Memory: Long Ago on Grandfather’s Farm, which is currently in search of a publisher. (April 2008)
Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and writer. He is the author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia and Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which is published this month. He is a BBC contributor and writes for the Daily Telegraph and the International Herald Tribune. (June 2008)
Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford, and the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey. (October 2008)
Willibald Sauerländer is a former director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. His most recent books are Romanesque Art: Problems and Monuments and Essai sur les Visages des Bustes de Houdon. (June 2007)
Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a new book of poems My Noiseless Entourage came out in the spring of 2005.
Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy. (June 2006)
Mark Strand teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His most recent book is New Selected Poems. (March 2008)
