Table of Contents
Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
Paul Krugman, What to Do
Barry Goldensohn, Driving Westward to San Diego (poem)
Sarah Kerr, The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño
2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy
Joan Didion, Darryl Pinckney, Obama: In the Irony-Free Zone
Ingrid D. Rowland, Mysteries of Siena
Renaissance Siena: Art for a City an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, October 24, 2007–January 13, 2008.
Michael Massing, Obama: In the Divided Heartland
Meyer Schapiro, Among Noble Monks 
Deborah Eisenberg, Becoming Susan Sontag
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
Michael Tomasky, How Historic a Victory?
Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by Larry M. Bartels
Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics edited by Ruy Teixeira
Mary Beard, Cruising with Caesar
Caesar: A Life in Western Culture by Maria Wyke.
Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman
Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History by Denis Feeney
Garry Wills, He Interviewed the Nation
Christian Caryl, An Asian Star Is Born
The China Lover by Ian Buruma
Sue Halpern, The War We Don't Want to See
War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003–2007 edited by Shawn Christian Nessen, Dave Edmond Lounsbury, and Stephen P. Hetz, with a foreword by Bob Woodruff
Generation Kill a miniseries written and produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, based on the book by Evan Wright
Baghdad ER a film directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill
Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery a film directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Alma Guillermoprieto, A Lost World on the Map
Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 edited by Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions
Jonathan Raban, The Prodigious Pessimist
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal edited by Jay Parini
Orhan Pamuk, My Turkish Library
Ian Jack, Seduced by Trains
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
James Gleick, 'If Shakespeare Had Been Able to Google...'
Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory by Roy Blount Jr.
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
The First English Dictionary, 1604 by Robert Cawdrey, with an introduction by John Simpson
Maya Jasanoff, The Unknown Women of India
Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India by Margaret MacMillan
Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire by Durba Ghosh
Charles Simic, 'Everything Is a Mystery'
How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2006 by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Alison Lurie, Do Schools Have to Be Boring?
School by Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor
The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching by Herbert R. Kohl
Social Design: Creating Buildings with People in Mind by Robert Sommer
Big Box Reuse by Julia Christensen
Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory by Jonathan Zimmerman
Children's Spaces edited by Mark Dudek
Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children by David Harsanyi
Elizabeth Drew, The Truth About the Election
Letters
John E. Merriam, 'The Plucky Little King'
Colin Wells, Joseph Needham's Big Question
Hugh McManus, The Lindisfarne Moment
Paul R. Goldin, Eliot Weinberger, 'China's Golden Age'
Robert F. Ober Jr., Visiting Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Contributors
Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, which won the Wolfson History Prize for 2008. (August 2009)
Christian Caryl is a Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy and Newsweek and a Senior Fellow of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (October 2009)
Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.
Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of twelve books.
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.
James Gleick, the author most recently of Isaac Newton, is working on a book about information. (December 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)
Alma Guillermoprieto often writes on Latin America in these pages. Her most recent book is Dancing with Cuba. (December 2008)
Sue Halpern is a scholar in residence at Middlebury. Her most recent book is Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research. (November 2009)
Ian Jack has edited Granta since 1995. He began his career in journalism on a weekly newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian Subcontinent). He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist and editor of the year. A book of his writing about Britain, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. He lives with his family in London.
Maya Jasanoff teaches British and imperial history at Harvard. She is the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. (December 2008)
Sarah Kerr, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, lives near Washington, D.C. (December 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)
Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.
Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.
Orhan Pamuk is the author, most recently, of Other Colors. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Maureen Freely has translated many of Orhan Pamuk's works into English. Her most recent novel is Enlightenment. (December 2008)
Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.
Jonathan Raban's books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.
Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has published a translation of Vitruvius' Ten Books of Architecture. Her latest books are a biography of Giordano Bruno and a translation of Bruno's dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies.
Meyer Schapiro, who died in 1996, taught for many years at Columbia. He was one of the most influential art historians of the last century and a contributor to The New York Review. Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, in which the letters in this issue appear, will be published in January by Getty. (December 2008)
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.
Michael Tomasky is editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American editor-at-large for The Guardian.
(December 2009)
Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006.
