Contents

March 23, 2006 • Volume 53, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

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)

John Updike was born in 1932 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 in 2009. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry. The poems in this issue will appear in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn, to be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (March 2006)

James M. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of, among other works, The Social History of an Indonesian Town and Negara: The Balinese State in the Nineteenth Century. (March 2006)

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

John Gross’s most recent book is A Double Thread, a memoir. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Parodies, which will be published in September. (April 2010)

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at NYU, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. He is the author of The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and, most recently, The American Classics. (October 2006)

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His latest book is Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet.
 (February 2012)

Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. (July 2011)

Robin Wells is the coauthor, along with Paul Krugman, of Economics and has taught economics at Princeton, Stanford Business School, and MIT.
 (July 2011)

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).

Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice in Robes, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Freedom’s Law. He is the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact.”

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

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

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.

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

Eliot Weinberger’s most recent book is the essay collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale.

Tony Judt (1948–2010) was the founder and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, among other books.

Al Alvarez’s most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.