Contents

June 26, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 11
  • Ian Buruma

    Ghosts

    Standard Operating Procedure a film directed by Errol Morris

    Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

  • Anne Carson

    Necks (poem) e-edition

  • John Updike

    The Clarity of Things’

  • Elizabeth Drew

    The Jim Webb Story

    A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America by Jim Webb

  • Jasper Griffin

    Virgil Lives! e-edition

    The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C.J. Putnam

  • Joshua Hammer

    The Reign of Thuggery

  • Edmund White

    In Love with Duras

    Wartime Writings: 1943–1949 by Marguerite Duras, edited by Sophie Bogaert and Olivier Corpet, and translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

    The War: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras,translated from the French by Barbara Bray

    The North China Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Leigh Hafrey

  • William Dalrymple

    India: The Place of Sex

    Chola: Sacred Bronzes of Southern India catalog of the 2007 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, edited by Vidya Dehejia

    The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra by James McConnachie

    Kamasutra: A New, Complete English Translation of the Sanskrit Text by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar

    Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Contexts by David Gordon White

  • Pico Iyer

    Holy Restlessness e-edition

    The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

  • Brian Urquhart

    The UN and the Race Against Death e-edition

    A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity by Jan Egeland

  • David Gilmour

    Garibaldi’s Gift e-edition

    Garibaldi: Citizen of the World by Alfonso Scirocco, translated from the Italian by Allan Cameron

  • Edmund S. Morgan

    Jefferson & Betrayal e-edition

    Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation by Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges

    Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers by Richard S. Newman

  • Christopher Benfey

    Melville’s Second Act e-edition

    Melville: The Making of the Poet by Hershel Parker

    Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine by Robert Milder

  • Francine Prose

    Casting a Lifeline e-edition

    Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew

  • John Brewer

    England: The Big Change e-edition

    A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 by Boyd Hilton

  • Richard J. Evans

    How Willing Were They? e-edition

    Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche

    Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City by Gordon J. Horwitz

  • Israel Rosenfield,
    Edward Ziff

    How the Mind Works: Revelations

    The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

    Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stuart J. Edelstein

    Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

    What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

    Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, with a foreword by Oliver Sacks

    Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and and Emotions by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, translated from the Italian by Frances Anderson

    A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi

  • Barbara Epler,
    Helen Vendler

    The Poets Light…’: An Exchange

LETTERS

Contributors

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.


Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and 
correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (January 2012)

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.


Anne Carson is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been honored with the Lannan Award for Poetry and the Pushcart Prize for Poetry. In 2000, she received the MacArthur Genius fellowship. She was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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.

Jasper Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include Homer on Life and Death. (March 2010)

Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels; the most recent is Jack Holmes and His Friend. He teaches writing at Princeton.

William Dalrymple is the author of The White Mughals, which won the Wolfson Prize for History, and The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize. His new book, Nine Lives, will be published in the fall. (February 2009)

Pico Iyer’s most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. His next book, The Man Within My Head, on hauntedness, Graham Greene, and fathers, will be out next March.
 (May 2011)

Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Life. (April 2011)

David Gilmour is the author of The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which was published in a revised and enlarged edition last year. He has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. (June 2008)

Edmund S. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His most recent book is The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America. (June 2011)

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His next book, to be published in the spring, is a family memoir called Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay.
 
(January 2012)

Francine Prose is the author of three collections of stories and ten novels. Her most recent novel, The Blue Angel, was nominated for the National Book Award.

John Brewerteaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century. (June 2008)

Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He is the author, most recently, of The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. (June 2008)

Israel Rosenfield’s most recent book is Freud’s Megalomania. (June 2008)

Edward Ziff is Professor of Biochemistry at the NYU School of Medicine. A new edition of his and Israel Rosenfield’s book DNA for Beginners will be published next year. (June 2008)

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Her most recent book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, was published last year.
 (November 2011)