Contents

June 12, 1997 • Volume 44, Number 10

LETTERS

Contributors

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

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.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.


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. (November 2011)

James Fenton is a visiting fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
 (March 2012)

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. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


Jeremy Bernstein’s books include Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element and Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, which was published in paperback in February. (May 2010)

Stephen Jay Gould teaches Geology, Biology, and the History of Science at Harvard and is the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at NYU. His latest book is The Lying Stones of Marrakech. (October 2001)

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Peter Holland holds the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He wrote the entry on Shakespeare in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (December 2004)

Michael Ignatieff is the Carr Professor and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His latest book is Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. (April 2003)

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

Edmund S. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His most recent book is The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America. (June 2011)

Richard Murphy’s most recent books are Collected Poems and The Kick: A Life Among Writers. (February 2004)

Andrew Hacker teaches at Queens College. His books include Money: Who Has How Much and Why, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and, most recently, Higher Education, written with Claudia Dreifus. (February 2012)

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Discovering Modernism, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies, and The Marketplace of Ideas.

David Remnick is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin’s Tomb, The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, and Resurrection. He is the editor of The New Yorker.

Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medal of Science. His latest book for general readers is Lake Views: This World and the Universe.