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Contents

August 10, 2006 • Volume 53, Number 13

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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)

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. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

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.

Diane Johnson is a novelist and critic. Her books include Lulu in Marrakechand Le Divorce. Her new book, Flyover Lives, will be published in January 2014.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

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.

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was an American novelist, essayist, and playwright. His many works include the memoirs Point to Point Navigation and Palimpsest, the novels The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge, and Lincoln, and the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992.

Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece, and Sugar Cane, a children’s book. She lives in New York.

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.

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.

Sarah Kerr, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, lives near Washington, D.C. (December 2008)

Jonathan Aaron’s new collection of poems, Journey to the Lost City, has just been published. (August 2006)

Pu Zhiqiang is a partner in the Huayi Law Firm in Beijing, where he specializes in cases of defamation, press freedom, product safety, and other aspects of public interest law. (August 2006)

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.

Al Alvarez is the author of Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

David Cole is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the award-winning author of several books, including The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009), Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (with Jules Lobel, 2007) and Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003) He has been awarded an Open Society Foundation Fellowship for 2012–2013 to write his next book, on the role of civil society in enforcing constitutional rights.


Max Rodenbeck is The Economist’s Mideast Correspondent. He lives in Cairo. (May 2013)

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, is now out in paperback.
 (March 2013)

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of US History Emeritus at Stanford. His recent books include Racism: A Short History and Not Just Black and White, a collection co-edited with Nancy Foner.

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Alma Guillermoprieto often writes on Latin America in these pages. She lives in Mexico City. (November 2012)

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)

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 recent works include 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. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

Stanley Hoffmann is Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard. His most recent books are Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy and Rousseau and Freedom, coedited with Christie McDonald.


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)

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at the NYU School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Harm in Hate Speech.
 (February 2013)