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Contents

July 17, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 12

LETTERS

Contributors

Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian of China, is the former East Asia Editor of The Times of London.
 (May 2013)

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

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


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.

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, was published in September.

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

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

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial-page columnist for The Guardian and author of Bring Home the Revolution: How Britain Can Live the American Dream.
 (October 2012)

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.

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her new book, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, will be published in the US in 
September. She has just been appointed Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. (May 2013)

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

Claire Messud’s books include When the World Was Steady and The Emperor’s Children. Her novel The Woman Upstairs will be published in April 2013. (February 2013)

Madison Smartt Bell is Professor of English and Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College. His new book, DevilA?s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, is forthcoming in November. (October 2009)

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)

Per Petterson is the author of five novels, including Out Stealing Horses. The excerpt in this issue is drawn from To Siberia, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October. (July 2008)

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play, Pastorale.
 She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in New York City.

Adam Michnik is Editor in Chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. His piece in this issue will appear in Andrei Sakharov and Human Rights, a collection of Sakharov’s writings that is being published by the Council of Europe this month. (January 2011)

Janos Kis, who teaches philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, was a leading member of the Hungarian democratic opposition to the Communist regime and co-founder and first chairman of Hungary’s liberal party. His latest book is Politics as a Moral Problem, which will be published in November. (July 2008)

Perry Link is retired from Princeton and now teaches at the University of California at Riverside. He translated China’s Charter 08 manifesto, published in these pages, and recently 
co-edited No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo. His latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, will be published in January 2013.

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)

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.

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.


Toni Morrison, Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton, is the author of seven novels. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. (August 2001)

Paul Auster is the author of ten novels, most recently The Book of Illusions. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeffrey Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and attended Brown University. He is the author of two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. He lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife.

Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of three books: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; You Shall Know Our Velocity, a novel; and Visitants, a collection of short stories. He lives in California.

Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels as well as volumes of short stories, poems, essays, and works for children. Among her novels are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both winners of the Nebula and Hugo awards.

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.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His latest book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.


Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism, and history. Her award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and No Go the Bogeyman. In 2006 she published Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media, a study of ghosts, phantasms, and technology. Her most recent work of fiction is the novel The Leto Bundle. A Fellow of the British Academy, she is also Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex.

Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has also published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture and a history of Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.