Contents

March 24, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 5

Contributors

Bill Moyers is the former host of NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, spokesperson for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy Awards, and the author of the best-selling books Listening to America, A World of Ideas, and Healing and the Mind. He lives in New York.

Michael Kimmelman is chief architecture critic of The New York Times, a 2012 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
 (April 2012)

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

Alexander Keyssar is Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the author, most recently, of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. He is currently writing a history of American electoral rules and institutions. (March 2005)

Andrew Delbanco is Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia. His new books, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be and The Abolitionist Imagination, will be published in April.
 (February 2012)

Richard Eder reviews books for various publications. (March 2005)

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956.
 (June 2013)

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.

Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. His latest book, Hallucinations, was published in November 2012.


Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul, teaches international relations at Boston University. He is writing a book about John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. (August 2011)

Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton. His recent works include The Making of Modern Liberalism and On Politics: A History of Political Thought.

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)

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was an anthropologist. Widely recognized as the most influential American anthropologist of the twentieth century, Geertz championed the role of symbols in the creation and interpretation of social meaning. His many books include Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns and Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics.