Contents

June 10, 1999 • Volume 46, Number 10

LETTERS

Contributors

Gabriele Annan is a book and film critic living in London. (March 2006)

Rosemary Dinnage’s books include The Ruffian on the Stair, One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant.

Václav Havel (1936–2011) was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. Havel was one of the six signers of the statement “Tibet: The Peace of the Graveyard.”

Tim Judah has written widely on foreign affairs. He reports on the Balkans for The Economist and its online column Eastern Approaches. He is the author of books about the region and a biography of Abebe Bikila, the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
 (May 2012)

Colin McGinn’s books include Shakespeare’s Philosophy, Basic Structures of Reality, and, most recently, Truth by Analysis.
 (March 2013)

Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian of China, is the former East Asia Editor of The Times of London.
 (May 2013)

Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. Among the exhibitions he has organized is “James McNeill Whistler,” seen at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 
(June 2013)

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.

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

Arthur Kempton, the author of Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, is a fellow at the Institute for African-American Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (March 2006)

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)

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of the American South. He taught at Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where he was named the Sterling Professor of History. His books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World.

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

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)

Amos Elon (1926–2009) was an Israeli journalist. His final book was The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews In Germany 1743 – 1933.

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.