Contents

January 12, 2006 • Volume 53, Number 1

LETTERS

Contributors

Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. His books include The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio and Body and Soul: Masterpieces of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture.
 (March 2012)

Meghan O’Rourke is the culture editor of Slate and a poetry editor of The Paris Review. She is the recipient of the 2005 Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Prize for poetry, awarded by Poetry magazine.

Jim Hansen is Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. (July 2006)

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.


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.

William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen, published by the Berkshire Publishing Group. His most recent publication, as editor, is the second edition of the Encyclopedia of World History.

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.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now 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. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.

Jeff Madrick teaches at Cooper Union. His latest book, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, was published in May. Frank Partnoy is the George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego. His most recent book is The Match King: The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals. (November 2011)

Lorin Stein is Editor of The Paris Review. (December 2011)

Joseph Kerman is emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing music criticism for The Hudson Review in the 1950s, and is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other journals. His books include Opera as Drama (1956; new and revised edition 1988), The Beethoven Quartets (1967), Contemplating Music (1986), Concerto Conversations (1999), and The Art of Fugue (2005).

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, a volume of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s writings, Experiments for the Future; and Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel, The Slynx. Her translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik will be published in 2011.

Scott Staton is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. (September 2005)

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. His books include King Leopold’s Ghost, a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist and and winner of Mark Lynton History Prize, and Bury the Chains, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and the PEN USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction. His most recent book is To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.

John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Among his most recent books are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, and The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

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)

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.