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Contents

June 22, 2006 • Volume 53, Number 11

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Mark Strand teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His new book of poems, Almost Invisible, will be published in January. (November 2011)

Frank Kermode lives in Cambridge, England. His latest book, Concerning E.M. Forster, was published in December. (July 2010)

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy. (June 2006)

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. (July 2008)

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.

Willibald Sauerländer is a former director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. His book on Rubens’s altarpieces has been just published. (November 2011)

Anne Barton is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean. (March 2007)

Ahdaf Soueif is a novelist and a writer on political and cultural affairs. Her latest novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. She was born in Egypt and lives in Cairo and London.

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.

Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of fourteen books, including one of the first books on the role of money in modern US politics, from 1983.


Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. (November 2011)

Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, will be published in March. He is the author of the best-selling Taliban, among other books, and lives in Lahore. (February 2012)

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)

Amos Elon’s most recent book is The Pity of It All: German Jews Before Hitler. He is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU. (February 2008)