Table of Contents
Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
Freeman Dyson, Our Biotech Future
W.S. Merwin, A Codex 
(poem)
Claire Messud, When Life Caught Up With Him
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan
Michael Tomasky, Can We Know Her?
A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein
Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.
John Updike, Serra's Triumph
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years Catalog of the exhibition by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke
J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
Ian Buruma, Herzog and His Heroes
Rescue Dawn a film written and directed by Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog: Documentaries and Shorts, 1962–1999
Herzog (Non)Fiction
Hilary Mantel, The Fate of a Demon
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
William Dalrymple, The Venetian Treasure Hunt
Venice and the Islamic World,828–1797 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Stefano Carboni
Al Alvarez, It Happened One Night
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Francisco Goldman, The Great Bolaño
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Helen Epstein, Getting Away With Murder
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by Allan M. Brandt
Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven
Garry Wills, An American Hero
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
Joyce Carol Oates, Lest We Forget
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology edited by Jonathan Lethem
Anita Desai, What If?
A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
David Cole, The Grand Inquisitors
Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice by John Ashcroft
General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy V. Baker
Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror by Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq
It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush by Joe Conason
Caleb Crain, The Miracle Woman
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America by Matthew Avery Sutton
Tim Parks, How To Read Elfriede Jelinek
Greed by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers
Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers
Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Michel Hulse
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel
Lust by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Michael Hulse
Colm Tóibín, Creating 'The Portrait of a Lady'
Thomas Powers, What Tenet Knew
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow
Jamey Gambrell, Putin Strikes Again
Harvey Cox, Jonathan Steele, Timothy Garton Ash, 'The Stasi on Our Minds': An Exchange
Letters
Niall Ferguson, William Dalrymple, The Question of Empire
The Editors, Correction
Contributors
Al Alvarez's most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in these pages. (May 2008)
Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. He received this year’s Shorenstein Award for writing about Asia. His novel The China Lover will be published this fall. (June 2008)
J. M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, is currently Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. His latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, was published in December. (March 2008)
David Cole is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the award-winning author of several books, including Less Safe, Less Free:Why America Is losing the War on Terror (with Jules Lobel, 2007) and Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003).
Caleb Crain is the author of Sweet Grafton, a novella published in the winter 2008 issue of the journal n+1. (May 2008)
William Dalrymple is the author of The White Mughals, which won the 2003 Wolfson Prize for History, and The Last Mughal, which won the 2007 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. He lives in New Delhi. (June 2008)
Anita Desai's most recent novel is The Zigzag Way. (July 2007)
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.
Helen Epstein's book book The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa was published last year. (August 2008)
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva's Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, a volume of Aleksandr Rodchenko's writings, Experiments for the Future, and many of the stories included in Tatyana Tolstaya's White Walls. Her translation of Vladimir Sorokin's Ice has recently been published by NYRB Classics.
Francisco Goldman is the author of two novels, The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman. He divides his time between Mexico City and New York City.
Hilary Mantel is the author of nine novels, including Beyond Black. The excerpt in this issue is drawn from her new novel, Wolf Hall, which will be published by Henry Holt/John Macrae Books in 2009. (August 2008)
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.
Claire Messud's most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. Her earlier novels include When the World Was Steady. (July 2008)
Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities at Princeton. Her collection of short novellas Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway has just been published, and her novel My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike will be published this summer. (June 2008)
Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of English Literature at IULM University in Milan. His novel Cleaver was published in February. (April 2008)
Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.
Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, and Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece and Sugar Cane a children's book. She lives in New York.
Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, and The Heather Blazing. The Master, a novel based on the life of Henry James, was published in 2004 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Among his nonfiction works are Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time. In 2004, his first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was produced in Dublin. His most recent novel, The Master, which is based on the life of Henry James, won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year Award in 2005 and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. He lives in Dublin.
Michael Tomasky is Editor of Guardian America, The Guardian’s American Web site. (June 2008)
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continues to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards. His most recent books are the novel Terrorist and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.
Garry Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia. One of our most distinguished
historians and critics, he is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal
Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards,
among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities.
He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. A regular contributor
to the New York Review of Books, he lives in Evanston, Illinois.
