Contents

November 3, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 17

LETTERS

Contributors

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)

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.

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.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.

Alan Ryan, the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell, is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women. He teaches at Princeton. (December 2011)

Jonathan Spence is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Death of Woman Wang, and Return to Dragon Mountain. (December 2011)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s most recent works are Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Michael Scammell is Professor of Writing and Translation at Columbia. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography and Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
 (December 2011)

Joyce Carol Oates is Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities and the Arts at Princeton. Her most recent books are A Widow’s Story: A Memoir and the forthcoming The Corn Maiden: Novellas and Stories. (September 2011)

Helen Epstein is the author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa. (May 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)

Andrew Hacker teaches at Queens College. His books include Money: Who Has How Much and Why, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and, most recently, Higher Education, written with Claudia Dreifus. (February 2012)

John Brewerteaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century. (June 2008)

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)

Aileen Kelly, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, is the author of Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance and, most recently, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin. (April 2007)

Human Rights Watch, the largest human rights organization based in the United States, conducts fact-finding investigations into human rights abuses worldwide. (November 2005)

Sherwin B. Nuland is Clinical Professor of Surgery and a Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. He is the author of How We Die, which won the National Book Award in 1994, and Lost in America. (December 2005)