Contents

September 20, 2001 • Volume 48, Number 14

LETTERS

Contributors

Sherwin B. Nuland is Clinical Professor of Surgery and a Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. He is the author of How We Die, which won the National Book Award in 1994, and Lost in America. (December 2005)

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.

Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.

Amy Knight’s books include Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors, Who Killed Kirov: The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery, and How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies.

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.


Kang Zhengguo is a Senior Lecturer at Yale. His most recent book is Lumeng (Deer Dreams) and he is now at work on his autobiography. (September 2001)

Perry Link is Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, specializing in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. He is currently Chancellorial Chair for Innovation in Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside. Along with Andrew J. Nathan, Link translated the Tiananmen Papers, which detailed the governmental response to the 1989 democracy protests. He is editing a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo that will appear in 2012 from Harvard University Press.

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.

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

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

Charles Sprawson is the author of Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero. (September 2001)

Hermione Lee is the author of a biography of Virginia Woolf and of Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, which has recently appeared in paperback. Her new biography, Edith Wharton, has just been published. (May 2007)

Andrew Delbanco is Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia. His new books, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be and The Abolitionist Imagination, will be published in April.
 (February 2012)

John Terborgh is Research Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke and Director of its Center for Tropical Conservation. His latest book is Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature. (October 2011)

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton and is the author, most recently, of Yeats and Violence. -

William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen, published by the Berkshire Publishing Group. His most recent publication, as editor, is the second edition of the Encyclopedia of World History.

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 most recent works are 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.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of six books, including How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard.

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His latest books are The Fall of the House of Walworth and Early Autumn. 
(September 2011)

Stuart Hampshire, formerly Warden of Wardham College, Oxford, is the author of Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.(October 2002)

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Joseph Connors, the Director of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, writes on Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. He was formerly Director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of art history at Columbia.

Gordon A. Craig is J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford. His latest book is Politics and Culture in Modern Germany. (December 2003)

Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author, with A.S. Khalidi, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. (September 2011)

Robert Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff. He is now Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group. (September 2011)

István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia and the author most recently of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, with Jan Gross and Tony Judt.
 (April 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)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His most recent book is Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. (October 2011)

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.

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)

James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is currently writing a book about Times Square. (February 2002)

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His forthcoming book is On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.
 (September 2009)

Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul, teaches international relations at Boston University. He is writing a book about John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. (August 2011)