Contents

December 17, 2009 • Volume 56, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Cathleen Schine is the author of several novels, including Rameau’s Niece, The Love Letter, She is Me, The New Yorkers, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Her latest novel, Fin & Lady, will be published in July 2013. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

John Lanchester is the author of five books including, most recently, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. In 2008 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 (December 2011)

Jerome Groopman, M.D. is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He is author of several books including Anatomy of Hope (2004), How Doctors Think (2007), and the recently released, Your Medical Mind.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. His latest book is More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India.

 
(October 2012)

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, is now out in paperback.
 (March 2013)

John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso, Volume Three, was published in 2007. Volume One won the Whitbread Prize in England in 1991.

Christopher Ricks teaches at Boston University and is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. His recent books include True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound and Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot.

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. His article in this issue draws on his essay in Tyringham Topics.
 (February 2013)

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.

Malise Ruthven is the author of Islam: A Very Short Introduction, Islam in the World: The Divine Supermarket (a study of Christian fundamentalism), A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, and several other books. His latest book is Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity.

Jay Neugeboren’s books include Imagining Robert, Sama?s Legacy, The Stolen Jew, and Big Man. His most recent novel, 1940, was published last year. (December 2009)

Wisława Szymborska, who died on February 1, 2012, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. (March 2012)

Stanisław Barańczak is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He won the 2007 Nike Award for the best work of Polish literature published in the previous year and the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement. He is a professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard University.

Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. (March 2012)

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.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

Mark Ford teaches in the English Department at University College London. His anthology London: A History in Verse was published last July.
 (June 2013)

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.


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.


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.

Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. Among the exhibitions he has organized is “James McNeill Whistler,” seen at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 
(June 2013)

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World.
 (January 2013)

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