Contents

September 23, 2004 • Volume 51, Number 14

LETTERS

Contributors

Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of fourteen books, including one of the first books on the role of money in modern US politics, from 1983.


Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of many books, including The Magic Lantern, an eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989.

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997. For more information, see the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

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.


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.

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)

Kathleen M. Sullivan was until recently the Dean of Stanford Law School, where she has returned to the faculty as the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law. (September 2004)

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)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the author of numerous books on American history, served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He died this year. His Journals: 1952– 2000, from which an excerpt appears in this issue, will be published in October by Penguin. (October 2007)

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist and critic with The Irish Times. His new book, Ship of Fools: How Corruption and Stupidity Killed the Celtic Tiger, will be published in the fall. (August 2009)

Richard Horton is a physician. He edits The Lancet, a weekly medical journal based in London and New York. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy. (June 2006)

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)

Adam Zagajewski’s books include Eternal Enemies 
and Without End: New and Selected Poems. The poems in this issue are from his new book, Unseen Hand, published in May by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (May 2011)

Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. (March 2012)

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911. Over the course of his long and prolific career he published works in many genres, including criticism (The Captive Mind), fiction (The Issa Valley), memoir (Native Realm), and poetry (New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001). He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He died in 2004.

Robert Hass is the author of several books of poems, most recently Sun Under Wood. Poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997, he teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley. (November 2005)

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

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened Americaå?s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)

Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. (March 2012)

Joseph Kerman is emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing music criticism for The Hudson Review in the 1950s, and is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other journals. His books include Opera as Drama (1956; new and revised edition 1988), The Beethoven Quartets (1967), Contemplating Music (1986), Concerto Conversations (1999), and The Art of Fugue (2005).

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)

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Discovering Modernism, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies, and The Marketplace of Ideas.

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.

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.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times and the coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, forthcoming in September.

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.

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.

Louis Begley is a writer and retired lawyer. He has written many novels, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt, Matters of Honor, and Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, which was published in 2009. His new novel, Schmidt Steps Back, will be published in March 2012. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of France and served as the president of PEN American Center from 1993 to 1995. He lives in New York with his wife, Anka Muhlstein, an historian of France.

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

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