Contents

November 19, 2009 • Volume 56, Number 18

LETTERS

Contributors

Richard Bernstein was Time‘s bureau chief in China and has been a correspondent in France and Germany for The New York Times. His books include The Coming Conflict with China and, most recently, A Girl Named Faithful Plum: The True Story of a Dancer from China and How She Achieved Her Dream.
 (February 2012)

Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard. His most recent books include Atlantic History: Concept and Contours and To Begin the World Anew. 
(November 2009)

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) He has been awarded an Open Society Foundation Fellowship for 2012–2013 to write his next book, on the role of civil society in enforcing constitutional rights.


William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. His latest book is The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. (November 2010)

Jeremy Bernstein’s books include Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element and Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, which was published in paperback in February. (May 2010)

Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medal of Science. His latest book for general readers is Lake Views: This World and the Universe.

Derek Walcott is a poet, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His epic poem Omerosis a reworking of the Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

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.

Dan Chiasson’s latest book of poetry, Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, is out in paperback. He teaches at Wellesley.

 (June 2013)

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)

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His book Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific will be published this month. (November 2012)

Peter Matthiessen won the 2008 National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country. His recent books include End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica and The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. (November 2009)

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)

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Author, Author and A Man of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

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.

Joost Hiltermann is Deputy Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group and Research Affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. (May 2012)

Sue Halpern is the editor of NYRB Lit and scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Her new book, A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, will be published in May.
 (March 2013)

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.

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.


Michael Kimmelman is chief architecture critic of The New York Times, a 2012 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
 (April 2012)

István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia. He is the author, with Jan Gross and Tony Judt, of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath.

Andrew Delbanco is Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia. His new books, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be and The Abolitionist Imagination, will be published in April.
 (February 2012)

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton.