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Contents

May 28, 1998 • Volume 45, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert Craft is a conductor and writer. Craft’s close working friendship with Igor Stravinsky is the subject of his memoir, An Improbable Life. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival.

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was a novelist, screenwriter and critic. His final novel is entitled Nothing Lost.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Humanities. His latest book is This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s, published last year. (April 2004)

Geraldine Norman was for many years Sale Room Correspondent of The Times of London. She is the author of The Sale of Works of Art, The Fake’s Progress (with Tom Keating and Frank Norman), and, most recently, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum. (February 1998)

Richard Jenkyns, a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, is Professor of the Classical Tradition at Oxford. His most recent book is Virgil’s Experience.(November 2001)

Enrique Krauze is the author of Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America. He is Editor in Chief of the magazine Letras Libres and was, for twenty years, Deputy Editor of Vuelta, whose editor was Octavio Paz. (June 2013)

John Leonard writes on books every month for Harper’s and on television every week for New York magazine. (June 2007)

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

Steven Mithen is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. His latest book, Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World, was published in November.
 (February 2013)

Howard Gardner teaches psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, is Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. (April 2002)

Jonathan Spence is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Death of Woman Wang, Treason by the Book, The Question of Hu, and The Search for Modern China.

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-American journalist and social critic. Known for his confrontational style and contrarian views on a range of social issues, Hitchens was a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. Hitchens recounts his struggle with esophageal cancer in Mortality, which was published in 2012.

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) was an Austrian art historian. Born in Vienna, Gombrich studied at the Theresianum and then at the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser. After graduating, he worked as a Research Assistant and collaborator with the museum curator and Freudian analyst Ernst Kris. He joined the Warburg Institute in London as a Research Assistant in 1936 and was named Director in 1959. His major works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art.

Warren Zimmermann, a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University, was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992. A revised edition of his book, Origins of a Catastrophe:Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers, has just been published in paperback. (June 1999)

Theodore H. Draper (1912–2006) was an American historian. Educated at City College, he wrote influential studies of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association.

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the 2012 Philosophical Book Award (Hannover) for his most recent book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.