Table of Contents

Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008

Reuel Wilson, At Gull Pond

Mark Danner, Obama & Sweet Potato Pie

Ian Buruma, The Lessons of the Master

The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French

Vladislav Hodasevich, The Monkey (poem)

David Bromwich, The Co-President at Work

The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism by Ron Suskind

The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage

Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President by Stephen F. Hayes

The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008 by Bob Woodward

J.M. Coetzee, Irène Némirovsky: The Dogs & the Wolves

David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair by Irène Némirovsky, translated from the French by Sandra Smith, with an introduction by Claire Messud

Jonathan Mirsky, Vietnam: Dead Souls

Ghosts of War in Vietnam by Heonik Kwon

The Boat by Nam Le

Martin Rees, Science: The Coming Century

John Ashbery, Episode (poem)

Claire Messud, Witnesses to a Mystery

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Colin Thubron, Fishing in the Dead Sea

Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim

The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation by Marwan Muasher

King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life by Nigel Ashton

Russell Baker, How They Blew Up the L.A. Times

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum

Daniel Mendelsohn, 'As Good as Great Poetry Gets'

Constantine Cavafy, Myres: Alexandria in 340 AD (poem)

Martin Filler, Wright in Love

Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954–1959 by Jane King Hession and Debra Pickrel, with a foreword by Mike Wallace

Frank Lloyd Wright: Essential Texts edited by Robert Twombly

The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Heroic Years, 1920–1932 by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a new introduction by Neil Levine

Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey by Pedro E. Guerrero

Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William R. Drennan

Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan

Oliver Sacks, Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers

Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, April 25–July 20, 2008; and the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, October 4, 2008– January 5, 2009

Andrew O'Hagan, What is Scotland?

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History by Hugh Trevor-Roper

Scotland: The Autobiography by Rosemary Goring

The Oxford Companion to Scottish History edited by Michael Lynch

Rainbow Kiss a play by Simon Farquhar, directed by Will Frears

Black Watch a play by Gregory Burke, directed by John Tiffany

Helen Vendler, The Friendship of Cal and Elizabeth

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

Anthony Grafton, 'But They Burned Giordano Bruno!'

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid D. Rowland

Robert M. Solow, Trapped in the New 'You're on Your Own' World

High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families by Peter Gosselin

Charles Rosen, What Happened to Wystan Auden?

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955 edited by Edward Mendelson

Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden edited by Stephen Burt with Hannah Brooks-Motl

John Banville, The Prime of James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Zadie Smith, Two Paths for the Novel

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Edward Castner, Reverend Blayney Colmore, David S. Cunningham, et al. 'Without God': An Exchange

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Letters

Judith Herrin, Arab Dreams of Ruling Europe
Dan Kurzman, István Deák, Can We Believe General Karl Wolff?
Rose Styron, Query

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Contributors

John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

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.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville's novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. On occasion he writes under the pen name Benjamin Black.

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. (November 2009)

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. He received the 2008 Erasmus Prize. His novel The China Lover was published in September 2008.

Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there in 1933. He wrote most of his poems while employed in the Third Circle of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works. (June 2005)

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 new work of fiction, Summertime, from which the piece in this issue is drawn, will be published by Harvill Secker in October. (August 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.

Martin Filler was the longtime architecture critic of House & Garden until it ceased publication in 2007. He is the co-author, with Olivier Bossiere, of The Vitra Design Museum: Frank Gehry, Architect, and author of Makers of Modern Architecture, based on essays from the New York Review.

Anthony Grafton teaches the history of Renaissance Europe at Princeton University. His books include Joseph Scaliger, Cardano's Cosmos, and Bring Out Your Dead.

Vladislav Hodasevich (1886–1939) was one of the most influential Russian poets of the last century. (November 2008)

Daniel Mendelsohn, a frequent contributor to The New York Review, is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. His translations, with commentary, of the Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems of Constantine Cavafy were published earlier this year; a collection of his essays mostly from these pages, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, was just published in paperback.
 (October 2009)

Claire Messud's most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. Her earlier novels include When the World Was Steady.
 (December 2009)

Jonathan Mirsky is a historian and journalist specializing in Chinese affairs. In 2002 he was the first I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Journalism School.
 (August 2009)

Andrew O'Hagan, who lives in London, is a recipient of the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel is Be Near Me.
 (October 2009)

Martin Rees is President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The essay in this issue is based on the 2008 Ditchley Foundation Anniversary Lecture. (November 2008)

Charles Rosen's latest book is Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist. (March 2009)

Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and, most recently, Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is University Artist and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, most recently On Beauty, and the editor of the short-story anthology The Book of Other People.

Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, won the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics. His most recent book is Work and Welfare. (May 2009)

Colin Thubron has written many books on his travels in Asia and is also a novelist. His latest book is Shadow of the Silk Road.
 (June 2009)

Helen Vendler's recent Mellon Lectures, entitled Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, will be published later this year. (March 2009)

Reuel Wilson’s memoir To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod, from which the essay in this issue is excerpted, has just been published by UPNE. (November 2008)

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