Table of Contents
Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008
Russell Baker, David Bromwich, Mark Danner, et al. A Fateful Election
Mark Ford, The Myths of Ted Hughes 
Letters of Ted Hughes selected and edited by Christopher Reid
Barry Goldensohn, Back Roads (poem)
Robert English, Georgia: The Ignored History
Harold Bloom, The Glories of Yiddish
History of the Yiddish Language by Max Weinreich, edited by Paul Glasser, translated from the Yiddish by Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman
Arnold Relman, McCain, Obama, and the National Health
Robert O. Paxton, A Field Guide to the Birders
Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding by Scott Weidensaul
Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal
The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott
The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature by Jonathan Rosen
Flights Against the Sunset: Stories that Reunited a Mother and Son by Kenn Kaufman
Brian Urquhart, The Middle East: What to Do?
A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East by Kenneth M. Pollack
G.W. Bowersock, The Classicist's Eye
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays by Daniel Mendelsohn
Benjamin M. Friedman, A Challenge to the Free Market
The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James K. Galbraith
Francis Wyndham, Tempting Targets
Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn
Amy Knight, Who Killed Anna Politkovskaya?
Letter to Anna: The Story of Journalist Politkovskaya’s Death a film directed by Eric Bergkraut, with English narration by Susan Sarandon
Bill McKibben, Green Fantasia
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman
James Fenton, Victims of Vermeermania
The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez
The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick
Kwame Anthony Appiah, How Muslims Made Europe
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215 by David Levering Lewis
Nathaniel Rich, The Deceptive Director
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King by Foster Hirsch
The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger by Chris Fujiwara
Preminger: An Autobiography by Otto Preminger
Neal Ascherson, In a London of Infinite Possibilities
Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi
Jose Miguel Vivanco, Daniel Wilkinson, Hugo Chávez Versus Human Rights
Eliot Weinberger, China's Golden Age
China: At the Court of the Emperors: Unknown Masterpieces from Han Tradition to Tang Elegance (25–907) an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, March 7–June 8, 2008
Poems of the Late T’ang translated from the Chinese and with an introduction by A.C. Graham
Letters
David J.R. Frakt, Anthony Lewis, 'Official American Sadism'
Julian Barnes, Frank Kermode, Sorry
Alan L. Goodman, Jonathan D. Spence, Why Didn't Science Rise in China?
John H. Gilchrist, Martin Filler, Credit for Bucky's Co-Worker
Richard Lines, Keen on Swedenborg
Patterson Sims, Gail Stavitsky, George Inness in Montclair
Morris Dickstein, The Irving Howe Memorial Lecture
Arnold Wolfson, Oliver Sacks in Orbit
Arien Mack, In Defense of Free Inquiry
Contributors
K. Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton. He is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Experiments in Ethics. He is working on a book about the role of honor in moral life. (November 2008)
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.
(July 2009)
Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale. He is the author of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine and American Religious Poems: An Anthology. His most recent book is Fallen Angels, with illuminations by Mark Podwal. (November 2008)
G.W. Bowersock is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Among his recent books are Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam and From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition. (May 2009)
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. (July 2009)
Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of three books: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels Through the 2000 Florida Recount; and Torture and Truth. Danner's work has been honored with many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York. His work is archived at markdanner.com.
Andrew Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia. He is working on a book on college education, to be published next year. (May 2009)
Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.
Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice in Robes, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Freedom's Law. He is the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact."
Robert English is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and the author of Russia and the Idea of the West. (November 2008)
James Fenton iis the editor of The New Faber Book of Love Poems and D.H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems. (July 2009)
Frances FitzGerald's books include Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. (November 2008)
Mark Ford teaches in the English Department at University College London. His most recent collection of poetry, Soft Sift, takes its title from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland. " This year he has published editions of the poetry of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. (January 2009)
Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His most recent book is The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. (November 2008)
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His most recent book is Free World. (November 2008)
Barry Goldensohn is the author of five collections of poems: St. Venus Eve, Uncarving the Block, The Marrano, Dance Music, and, with his wife, Lorrie, East Long Pond. (December 2008)
Amy Knight is the author most recently of How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies. (November 2008)
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. (June 2009)
Joseph Lelyveld's book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1986. (April 2009)
Bill Mckibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
Robert O. Paxton is Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia. His latest book is The Anatomy of Fascism. (April 2009)
Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.
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), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), 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.
Arnold Relman is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. His latest book is A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care.
(July 2009)
Nathaniel Rich is an editor at The Paris Review and the author of San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. His novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, was published this year. (November 2008)
Michael Tomasky is editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American editor-at-large for The Guardian. (July 2009)
Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey. (March 2009)
Jose Miguel Vivanco is Americas director of Human Rights Watch. (November 2008)
Eliot Weinberger's most recent book is a sequence of essays, An Elemental Thing.
Daniel Wilkinson is Americas deputy director of Human Rights Watch. (November 2008)
Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006.
Francis Wyndham was born in London in 1924. He graduated from Eton in 1940 and spent a year at Oxford before being drafted into the army in 1942. When it became clear that he was suffering from tuberculosis, he was dismissed from service and returned to London, where he began writing reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and working on the short stories that would later be collected in Out of the War (not published until 1974). During the 1950s he worked as a critic and editor at Queen and in 1964 was hired by The Sunday Times, where he stayed until 1980. He
collaborated with David King on Trotsky: A Documentary and is the author of a collection of essays, The Theatre of Embarrassment; a novel, The Other Garden (winner of the 1987 Whitbread First Novel Award); and co-editor of The Letters of Jean Rhys.
