Table of Contents
Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
Jonathan Raban, Metronatural America
Wendy and Lucy a film by Kelly Reichardt, adapted from a story by Jon Raymond
Livability: Stories by Jon Raymond
Elizabeth Drew, The Thirty Days of Barack Obama
Richard Dorment, From Shtetl to Château
Chagall: A Biography by Jackie Wullschlager
Daniel Mendelsohn, Transgression
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
Brian Urquhart, What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, with an introduction by Andrew J. Bacevich
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich
The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) by James Traub
Lorrie Moore, How He Wrote His Songs
Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty
Amartya Sen, Capitalism Beyond the Crisis
Stephen Greenblatt, A Great Dane Goes to the Dogs 
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
H. Allen Orr, Which Scientist Can You Trust?
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation by Steven Shapin
Helen Vendler, Defender of the Earth
The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin
Richard Bernstein, The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City
The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan
Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China by Jen Lin-Liu
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917–2008
Cass R. Sunstein, The Enlarged Republic—Then and Now
David A. Harris, Roger Cohen, 'Eyeless in Gaza': An Exchange
Paul N. Courant, Ann Kjellberg, J. D. McClatchy, et al. Google & Books: An Exchange
Letters
Ronald Schuchard, The Complete T.S. Eliot
David Ansen, The Hollywood Kennedy
James M. McPherson, White South Africans and Their Slaves
David Cole, Where Reagan Stopped
Contributors
Richard Bernstein is a former Time correspondent in China and a correspondent in France and Germany for The New York Times. His most recent book is The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. (November 2009)
Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. (October 2009)
Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of twelve books.
Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. (November 2009)
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)
Lorrie Moore teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She has won the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, is published this month. (September 2009)
H. Allen Orr is University Professor and Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He is the author, with Jerry A. Coyne, of Speciation. (March 2009)
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.
Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His
most recent book is Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. (March 2009)
Cass R. Sunstein, who is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is on leave of absence and working in the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. His essay in this issue, written before he began work for the government, will appear in different form in the John Harvard Library edition of The Federalist to be published in October; parts of the essay draw on his article –?Interest Groups in American Public Law,–? Stanford Law Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1985). (March 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 Life. (August 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)
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1996, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! He is writing a book on Winston Churchill’s reputation and legacy. (October 2009)
