Contents

March 26, 1998 • Volume 45, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Lars-Erik Nelson (1941-2000) was the Washington columnist for the New York Daily News, and a frequent contributor to the Review.

Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937. He is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, the National Book Award–winning Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. He has also written short stories, essays, and screenplays, and published a short story collection, Bear and His Daughter, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New York City and in Key West, Florida.

Simon Leys is the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. Leys’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, and other periodicals. Among his books are Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon (forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Other People’s Thoughts, and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Boyer lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, the Prix Guizot, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

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

David J. Rothman is Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine and History at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and president of the Institute on Medicine as a Professor.

James McPherson is George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. His most recent book is War on the Waters: The Union and Confederates Navies, 1861-1865.