Contents

December 18, 2003 • Volume 50, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Henry Siegman is President of the U.S./Middle East Project. He is a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress.

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.
(February 2012)

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)

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. (March 2011)

Frank J. Sulloway is Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. (November 2006)

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.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times‘s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.

K. Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton and is President of the PEN American Center. His most recent book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.
 (December 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.


Robert Gottlieb has been Editor in Chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. His most recent book is Lives and Letters. (September 2011)

Jasper Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include Homer on Life and Death. (March 2010)

André Aciman is the author of the novels Eight White Nights and Call Me by Your Name, the nonfiction works Out of Egypt and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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)

Jeff Madrick teaches at Cooper Union. His latest book, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, was published in May. Frank Partnoy is the George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego. His most recent book is The Match King: The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals. (November 2011)

John Bayley has written two books about his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends. (July 2004)

Joyce Carol Oates is Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities and the Arts at Princeton. Her most recent books are A Widow’s Story: A Memoir and the forthcoming The Corn Maiden: Novellas and Stories. (September 2011)

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

Thomas R. Edwards is Emeritus Professor of English at Rutgers and a former editor of Raritan. His most recent book is Over Here: Criticizing America, 1968–1989. (June 2004)

Cathleen Schine is the author of several novels, including Rameau’s Niece, The Love Letter, She is Me, The New Yorkers, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

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.

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.

Al Alvarez’s most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

Lewis Lockwood is Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music at Harvard. He is the author of Beethoven: The Music and the Life and, most recently, co-editor with Mark Kroll of The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance. (November 2004)

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. Parts of his essay in the Review‘s October 13, 2011 issue were drawn from his Tanner Lectures on Human Value at Stanford University, which will be published next year as Torture and the Forever War. His work can be found at markdanner.com.

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955 he co-founded The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot’s Ghost; Oswald’s Tale; The Gospel According to the Son; and The Castle in the Forest.