Contents

September 26, 2002 • Volume 49, Number 14

LETTERS

Contributors

Sue Halpern is a scholar in residence at Middlebury. Her most recent book is Can’t Remember What I Forgot: Your Memory, Your Mind, Your Future.
 (January 2012)

Bruce Gilley is a doctoral student in politics at Princeton University and a former contributing editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of the forthcoming China’s Democratic Future, Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China’s Richest Village, and Tiger on the Brink: Jiang Zemin and China’s New Elite.

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the author of China’s Transition, China’s Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy, and Chinese Democracy, the coauthor of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security, and the co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers.

Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of, among other works, The Social History of an Indonesian Town and Negara: The Balinese State in the Nineteenth Century. (March 2006)

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; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. His latest book of poetry is Planisphere and his new translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations will be available in paperback in May.


Margaret Atwood is the author of eleven novels, among them The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009.
 (April 2010)

Diane Johnson’s most recent novel is Lulu in Marrakech. (March 2012)

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of Liberal Studies at the New School.

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.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

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.

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. (November 2011)

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.

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)

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice in Robes, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Freedom’s Law. He is the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact.”

Tim Judah is the Balkans Correspondent of TheEconomist. He is the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, a new edition of which has just been published. He is also the author of two books on Kosovo and one on the Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila. He has reported on the Balkans, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Sudan for The New York Review.
 (March 2010)

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

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture. Her latest books are a biography of Giordano Bruno and a translation of Bruno’s dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies.

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)

Benjamin Demott is Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst. His most recent book is Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind. (May 2005)

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. The article in the Review‘s November 24, 2011 issue is drawn from his new book, Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (Viking).

Frances FitzGerald’s books include Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. (November 2008)