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Contents

May 26, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Pankaj Mishra 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. Mishra’s recent books include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.

John Balaban is Poet-in-Residence at North Carolina State University. His books include Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems and a memoir of his years in Vietnam, Remembering Heaven’s Face. (May 2005)

Jeff Madrick writes an economics column for Harper’s Magazine, is editor of Challenge Magazine, and is director of the Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Roo­sevelt Institute. His most recent book is Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America.

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.

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. His article in this issue draws on his essay in Tyringham Topics.
 (February 2013)

Gary Shteyngart’s novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His next novel, Absurdistan, is forthcoming in 2006. (May 2005)

P. N. Furbank is the author of nine books, including biographies of Samuel Butler, Italo Svevo, and E.M. Forster.

Amos Elon (1926–2009) was an Israeli journalist. His final book was The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews In Germany 1743 – 1933.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

Mike Wallace is coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, author of A New Deal for New York, Distinguished Professor at John Jay College (CUNY), and Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. He is working on Gotham II. (February 2005)

Guy Lawson is a writer-at-large for GQ whose work has also appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Observer. (May 2005)

Patrick Radden Keefe is a project leader at the World Policy Institute and the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. (May 2005)

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.

Jerome Groopman, M.D. is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He is author of several books including Anatomy of Hope (2004), How Doctors Think (2007), and the recently released, Your Medical Mind.

Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries, and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She has advised numerous organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and UNICEF. She writes frequently for various publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta, and is the author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa.

Peter Savodnik is the political editor of The Hill newspaper, in Washington. He was recently in Ukraine doing research for a book on political identity in post-Communist society. (February 2005)