Contents

April 12, 2007 • Volume 54, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC and the Open Society Foundations. (September 2012)

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. His play, The Testament of Mary, is now being staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

Sanford Schwartz’s reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers. (July 2013)

Hayden Pelliccia is a Professor of Classics at Cornell. (November 2012)

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel, Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

Jason DeParle, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare. (April 2007)

William Finnegan’s books include A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique and Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. (April 2007)

Taylor Branch is the author of America in the King Years, a narrative history of the modern Civil Rights era in three volumes: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. (April 2007)

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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.

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of several books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications and his most recent book is The Man Within My Head.

Daniel J. Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale. His recent works include The Baltimore Case and he is currently completing a history of intellectual property in plants, animals, and people.


John Gross (1935–2011) was an English editor and critic. From 1974 to 1981, he was editor of The Times Literary Supplement; he also served as senior book editor and critic at The New York Times. His memoir, A Double Thread, was published in 2001.

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.

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the 2012 Philosophical Book Award (Hannover) for his most recent book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.

Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. His latest book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

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.

Hugh Thomas is the author of The Spanish Civil War, Cuba: The Pursuit of Liberty, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico, and, most recently, The Slave Trade. (April 1998)

Walter Laqueur is a historian of Europe and the Middle East. He has taught at Brandeis, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago.

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)

Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His books include Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing and The Server.

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. (June 2013)

Robert Conquest, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of The Great Terror. (March 1997)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

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.

Martin Filler was the longtime architecture critic of House & Garden, until it ceased publication in 2007. He is the co-author, with Olivier Bossiere, of The Vitra Design Museum: Frank Gehry, Architect, and author of Makers of Modern Architecture, which is based on essays from The New York Review. A second volume of his writings on architecture is forthcoming from New York Review Books.


J. Michael Lennon, Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University, recently coauthored with Mailer On God: An Uncommon Conversation. He is currently editing Mailer’s selected letters and writing his authorized biography. (February 2009)