Table of Contents
Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009
Elaine Blair, Axler's Theater
The Humbling by Philip Roth
Garry Wills, A One-Term President?: The Choice
Michael Tomasky, Who Are the Blue Dogs?
Jonathan D. Spence, Specters of a Chinese Master 
Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733–1799) an exhibition at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, April 9–July 12, 2009; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 6, 2009– January 10, 2010
Paul Muldoon, A Second Hummingbird (poem)
Timothy Garton Ash, Velvet Revolution: The Prospects
Harold Bloom, Yahweh Meets R. Crumb
The Book of Genesis illustrated by R. Crumb
Claire Messud, In Evin Prison
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran by Haleh Esfandiari
Ingrid D. Rowland, With Berlusconi in the Soup
Robert Gottlieb, Nearly Anything Goes
John Banville, Emerson: 'A Few Inches from Calamity'
First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson
Hussein Agha, Robert Malley, Israel & Palestine: Can They Start Over?
Joyce Carol Oates, 'Who Do You Think You Are?'
Too Much Happiness: Stories by Alice Munro
John Terborgh, The World Is in Overshoot
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery by Steve Nicholls
Paula Fox, Light on the Dark Side
A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem
Timothy Snyder, Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews
The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union by Yitzhak Arad
Brad Leithauser, Voices in the Heartland
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Pankaj Mishra, The Palestinian Poet Who Came Back
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman
Walter Kaiser, Saving the Magic City
Florence 1900: The Quest for Arcadia by Bernd Roeck, translated from the German by Stewart Spencer
Raymond Baker, Eva Joly, Illicit Money: Can It Be Stopped?
Keith Thomas, Fighting over History
What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe by Anthony Grafton
Edward Witten, The New J-Lobby for Peace
Letters
Noam Schimmel, Howard W. French, The Debate over Rwanda
Michael Shae, Pynchon: The Sun Also Rises
Contributors
Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author, with A.S. Khalidi, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. (December 2009)
Raymond Baker is Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and Director of Global Financial Integrity in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. (December 2009)
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.
Elaine Blair is the author of Literary St. Petersburg. (December 2009)
Harold Bloom's forthcoming books are Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence and Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems. He teaches at Yale. (December 2009)
Paula Fox is the author of two memoirs, Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe, and six novels, including Desperate Characters and The Widow’s Children. She is also the author of numerous children’s books, including The Slave Dancer, which was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1974.
(December 2009)
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 books include Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name and (as editor with Adam Roberts) Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present.
(December 2009)
Robert Gottlieb has been Editor in Chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. He is the author of a biography of George Balanchine, the editor of the anthologies Reading Dance and Reading Jazz, and the dance critic of The New York Observer.
(December 2009)
Eva Joly, a former prosecuting magistrate in France, is a member of the European Parliament, where she is Chairwoman of the Committee on Development. She is the author of Justice Under Siege: One Woman’s Battle Against a European Oil Giant.
(December 2009)
Walter Kaiser is a former Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in Florence. He is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Harvard.
(December 2009)
Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in
Massachusetts.
Robert Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab–Israeli Affairs and Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff. He is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group. (December 2009)
Claire Messud's most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. Her earlier novels include When the World Was Steady.
(December 2009)
Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.
Paul Muldoon is Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton and Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. His eleventh collection of poems, Maggot, will be published next year. (December 2009)
Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities at Princeton, is the author most recently of the novel Little Bird of Heaven and the story collection Dear Husband. (December 2009)
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.
Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His most recent book is The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. His new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, will be published in September 2010.
Jonathan Spence is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His latest book is Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. (December 2009)
John Terborgh is Research Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and Director of the Center for Tropical Conservation at Duke. His latest book is Making Parks Work: Strategies for Preserving Tropical Nature. (December 2009)
Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His latest book is The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. (December 2009)
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.
Edward Witten, a Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been on the board of Americans for Peace Now since 1991. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990. (December 2009)
