Contents

December 19, 2002 • Volume 49, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Anne Barton is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean. (March 2007)

Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Life. (April 2011)

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.


Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

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

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)

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was born in Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt. A poet, novelist, translator, and critic as well as writer for children, Jarrell was a prolific author whose best-known works include the poems collected in The Woman at the Washington Zoo and The Lost World, the academic comedy Pictures from an Institution, the children’s story The Bat Poet, and Poetry and the Age, a group of essays. An influential critic who, as poetry reviewer for The Nation, helped to launch the careers of Robert Lowell and other contemporaries, Jarrell taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, where he was much revered. He died in a car accident in 1965.

Stephen Burt is a professor at Macalester College. (June 2001)

P. N. Furbank is the author of nine books, including biographies of Samuel Butler, Italo Svevo, and E.M. Forster.

Jennifer Homans is a former professional dancer. She lives in New York City and is writing a history of classical ballet. (December 2002)

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

Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Master (a novel based on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

Mark Strand teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His new book of poems, Almost Invisible, will be published in January. (November 2011)

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College. His newest book, Ten Popes Who Shook the World, was published in October. (January 2012)

Patrick Marnham’s most recent book is Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance. (December 2002)

Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for The New Yorker, Slate, and other publications. (May 2003)

Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance, a collection of three novellas, will be published this year. (April 2011)

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and a Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy magazine

Michael Ignatieff is the Carr Professor and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His latest book is Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. (April 2003)

Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His latest book is Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing. A new novel, The Server, will be published in 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)

Amos Elon’s most recent book is The Pity of It All: German Jews Before Hitler. He is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU. (February 2008)

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)

Colin McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He was recently awarded an honorary degree by the University of Kent and has three books forthcoming. (March 2011)

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.