Contents

November 6, 2003 • Volume 50, Number 17
  • Russell Baker

    The Awful Truth

    The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman

  • John Updike

    Singular in Everything e-edition

    El Greco catalog of the exhibition edited by David Davies, with essays by Davies and John H. Elliott and contributions by Xavier Bray, Keith Christiansen, Gabriele Finaldi, Marcus Burke, and Lois Oliver

  • Elizabeth Hardwick

    Funny as a Crutch

    Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings selected and with notes by Sacvan Bercovitch

    Nathanael West by Robert Emmet Long

    Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Jay Martin

  • Andrew O’Hagan

    Imitation of Life e-edition

    Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem by Anthony Bozza

    Eminem “Talking”: Marshall Mathers in His Own Words by Chuck Weiner

    Angry Blonde by Eminem

  • Roger Shattuck

    Tumult in the Clouds e-edition

    Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention by Peter L. Jakab

    Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War by Richard P. Hallion

    To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight by James Tobin

    Progress in Flying Machines by Octave Chanute

    Les Avions de la Grande Galerie Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace

    The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age by Tom D. Crouch and Peter L. Jakab

    First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane by T.A. Heppenheimer

    The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright edited by Peter L. Jakab and Rick Young

    How We Invented the Airplane: An Illustrated History by Orville Wright, edited by Fred C. Kelly

    Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight by Paul Hoffman

    Unlocking the Sky: Glenn Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane by Seth Shulman

    Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight by William Langewiesche

    No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World’s Most Dangerous Sport by Joshua Cooper Ramo

    North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life by Bob Buck

  • Luc Sante

    My Lost City

  • Ronald Dworkin

    Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties e-edition

  • Freeman Dyson

    Clockwork Science e-edition

    Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps:Empires of Time by Peter Galison

  • Garry Wills

    The Negro President e-edition

  • Rosemary Dinnage

    In Love with Verdi e-edition

    Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism by David R.B. Kimbell

    The Man Verdi by Frank Walker

    Verdi: A Biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz

  • Steven Weinberg

    What Price Glory? e-edition

    A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac, Vol. 3 by Bruce Catton

    The World Crisis, Vol. 4 by Winston S. Churchill

    Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century by Kelly DeVries

    Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower

    The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens translated and edited by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz

    War in European History by Michael Howard

    From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. 4 by Arthur J. Marder

    Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy by Richard M. McMurry

    Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military by William Mitchell

    Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942 by Samuel Eliot Morison

    A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages by C.W.C. Oman

    The Art of War in the Middle Ages, AD 378–1515 by C.W.C. Oman, revised and edited by John H. Beeler

    Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne

    Hankey: Man of Secrets, Vol. 1, 1877–1918 by Stephen Roskill

    The Victory at Sea by William S. Sims

    The Bayeux Tapestry: A Comprehensive Survey edited by Frank Stenton

    Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945 by Russell F. Weigley

    A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg

    Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White

    The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers translated and edited by R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall

  • Larry McMurtry

    Leaving the Lake e-edition

    Love Me by Garrison Keillor

  • John Banville

    Good Man, Bad World e-edition

    Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor

    Inside George Orwell by Gordon Bowker

  • Joyce Carol Oates

    News from Everywhere e-edition

    A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray

    Goblin Fruit by David Marshall Chan

    Red Ant House by Ann Cummins

    Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady

  • Charles Rosen

    Culture on the Market e-edition

  • Tim Parks

    The Outsider’s Art e-edition

    The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by R.W. Flint, and with an introduction by Mark Rudman

    The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese translated from the Italian and with an introduction by R.W. Flint

    Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950 by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

    The Harvesters by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by A.E. Murch

    Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950 by Cesare Pavese, edited by Marziano Guglielminetti and Laura Nay, with an introduction by Cesare Segre

    An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese by Davide Lajolo, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Mario and Mark Pietralunga

  • Margaret Atwood

    He Springs Eternal e-edition

    Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times by Studs Terkel

  • Joan Didion

    Mr. Bush & the Divine e-edition

    Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

  • Jeremy Bernstein,
    Peter D. Lax,
    Thomas Powers

    Heisenberg & the Bomb: An Exchange

  • John Dominic Crossan,
    Jonathan L. Reed,
    E.P. Sanders

    Who Was Jesus?’: An Exchange

LETTERS

Contributors

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

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.

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and The Dolphin are among his many volumes of verse. He was confounder of and contributor to The New York Review of Books.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew O’Hagan’s latest book, The Atlantic Ocean: Reports from Britain and America, was published in the United States in January.
 (May 2013)

Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) was an American writer and scholar of French culture. He taught at Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Boston University, where he was named University Professor. His books includeForbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.

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.

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

Rosemary Dinnage’s books include The Ruffian on the Stair, One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant.

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.

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.

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His books include Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing and The Server.

Margaret Atwood is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Blind Assassin, among other novels. Her most recent work of fiction is I’m Starved for You, a long short story available as an e-book.


(May 2012)

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

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. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


E. P. Sanders is the Art and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke and the author of Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Jesus and Judaism, and Judaism: Practice and Belief. (April 2003)

Elizabeth Drew is a regular contributor to The New York Review and the former Washington correspondent of The Atlantic and The New Yorker. She is the author of fourteen books.
 (March 2013)

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 also published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture and a history of Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.