Contents

February 28, 1985 • Volume 32, Number 3

LETTERS

Contributors

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was an anthropologist. Widely recognized as the most influential American anthropologist of the twentieth century, Geertz championed the role of symbols in the creation and interpretation of social meaning. His many books include Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns and Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics.

Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009) was a British philosopher. First outlined in The Uses of Argument, his model for analyzing arguments has had a lasting influence on fields as diverse as law, computer science and communications theory. Toulmin’s other works include The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning and Return to Reason.

Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Edwin Frank is the editor of NYRB Classics.

Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in Massachusetts.

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917–2009) was an Irish historian and politician. He was elected to the Irish parliament in 1969 and served as a Minister from 1973 until 1977. His works include States of Ireland, The Great Melody and Memoir: My Life and Themes.

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She wrote about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the mother of Michelle, in her book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, just out in paperback. Her collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers will be published in the spring of 2013.


She lives in New York.

Christopher Ricks teaches at Boston University and is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. His recent books include True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound and Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot.

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 Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. His latest book, Hallucinations, was published in November 2012.


Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography and Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
He is Professor Emeritus of Writing and Translation at Columbia.
 (March 2013)

H. R. Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was a British historian and the author of The Last Days of Hitler. He taught at Oxford, where he was the Regius Professor Modern History.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence

Andrew Hacker teaches political science at Queens College. He is currently working on a book on mathematics with Claudia Dreifus.
 (January 2013)

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States.