Contents

June 9, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 10

LETTERS

Contributors

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

Robin Robertson’s fourth collection of poetry, The Wrecking Light, was published last year, along with his selection of English ­versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, The Deleted World.
 (February 2012)

Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mark Morris, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She also edited the recent, unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Robert Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff. He is now Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group. (September 2011)

Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author, with A.S. Khalidi, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. (September 2011)

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.

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

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.

Michael Chabon is the author of ten books, including The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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.

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.


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)

Robert Bartlett is Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is the author of The Making of Europe, The Hanged Man, and The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. (June 2010)

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

Witold Rybczynski is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the architecture critic for Slate. His book on American building, Last Harvest, was published in 2007.

Mark Ford’s third collection of poetry, Six Children, a volume of criticism, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays, and his translation of Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique were recently published. (October 2011)

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

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

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)