Contents

June 24, 1999 • Volume 46, Number 11
  • Timothy Garton Ash

    Kosovo and Beyond e-edition

  • Louis Menand

    Billion-Dollar Baby e-edition

    Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace a film by George Lucas

  • John Updike

    On Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) e-edition

  • Helen Epstein

    The Fly in the DNA e-edition

    Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner

  • Christopher de Bellaigue

    Justice and the Kurds e-edition

    Turkey’s Kurdish Question by Henri J. Barkey, by Graham E. Fuller

  • Anthony Grafton

    The Jew from Tangier e-edition

    A Journey to the End of the Millennium: A Novel by A.B. Yehoshua

  • Joseph Kerman

    Beethoven and the Big Change e-edition

    Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance by Leon Plantinga

    Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4, Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor,” and Choral Fantasy Choir fortepiano Robert Levin. the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and the Monteverdi, directed by John Eliot Gardiner

  • John Ashbery

    This Room (poem)

  • Joyce Carol Oates

    The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey e-edition

    Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: JonBenét and the City of Boulder by Lawrence Schiller

    Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? by Cyril Wecht, by Charles Bosworth Jr.

    A Mother Gone Bad: The Hidden Confession of JonBenét’s Killer by Andrew G. Hodges

    Death of a Little Princess: The Tragic Story of the Murder of JonBenét Ramsey by Carlton Smith

  • Luc Sante

    On ‘The Big Con’ e-edition

  • Gordon A. Craig

    The War Against War e-edition

    Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross by Caroline Moorehead

    The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty by Neil Belton

  • Peter Brown

    A New Augustine e-edition

    Saint Augustine by Garry Wills

    The Works of Saint Augustine III/11: Newly Discovered Sermons translated by Edmund Hill

    Saint Augustine: Letters VI (1*-29*) translated by Robert B Eno

  • Howard Gardner

    The Enigma of Erik Erikson e-edition

    Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson by Lawrence J. Friedman

  • Michael Wood

    Tight Little Island e-edition

    The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst

    England, England by Julian Barnes

  • Leo Marx

    The Struggle Over Thoreau e-edition

    The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal Volume 1: 1837-1844 Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell

    The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal Volume 2: 1842-1848 Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell

    The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal Volume 3: 1848-1851 Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell

    The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal Volume 4: 1851-1852 Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell

    The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal Volume 5: 1852-1853 Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell

    Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings by Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Bradley P. Dean

    A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 by Henry David Thoreau, with an introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck

    Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840-1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary edited by Perry Miller

    Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism by George#tedited by Sessions

    Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal by Sharon Cameron

  • Charles Hope

    In Lorenzo’s Garden e-edition

    Three Worlds of Michelangelo by James H. Beck

  • John Banville

    The Friend of Promise e-edition

    Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis

  • Joan Didion

    Uncovered Washington e-edition

    Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story by Michael Isikoff

    Active Faith: How ChristiansAre Changing the Soul of American Politics by Ralph Reed

    Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert H. Bork

  • Victor Davis Hanson,
    John Heath,
    Peter Green

    Who Killed Homer?’: An Exchange

LETTERS

Contributors

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, Eclipse, The Sea (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and Ancient Light. As Benjamin Black he has written six crime novels, including Vengeance.

Gordon A. Craig (1913–2005) was a Scottish-American historian of Germany. He taught at both Princeton and Stanford, where he was named the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1979.

Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

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)

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of many books, including The Magic Lantern, an eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989. His most recent book is Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name. He is currently leading an Oxford University 
research project for the discussion of global free speech norms (www.freespeechdebate.com) and working on a book about free speech.

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.


Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Adjunct Professor at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is Diodorus Siculus: The Persian Wars to the Fall of Athens, Books 11–14.34 (480–401 BCE).
 (November 2012)

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His latest book is Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup. He lives in Tehran with his wife and two children.

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His most recent book is Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, published in September. (December 2012)

Anne Barton is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Charles Hope was Director of the Warburg Institute, London, from 2001 to 2010. He is the author of Titian.


Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries, and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She has advised numerous organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and UNICEF. She writes frequently for various publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta, and is the author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa.

Larry McMurtry lives in Archer City, Texas. His novels include The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove (winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Folly and Gloryand Rhino Ranch. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West and, most recently, Custer.

Leo Marx is the Kenan Professor of American Cultural History (Emeritus) at MIT and most recently the editor, with Bruce Mazlish, of Progress:Fact or Illusion? (July 1999)

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Marketplace of Ideas, American Studies and The Metaphysical Club.

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and Folk Photography. He has translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and written the introduction to George Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (both available as NYRB Classics). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

John Updike (1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit: Angstrom, he two of which, Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

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

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

Joseph Kerman is emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing music criticism for The Hudson Review in the 1950s, and is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other journals. His books include Opera as Drama (1956; new and revised edition 1988), The Beethoven Quartets (1967), Contemplating Music (1986), Concerto Conversations (1999), and The Art of Fugue (2005).

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Accursed. She is Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Princeton.