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Contents

April 29, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 7

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His latest book is Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet.
 (February 2012)

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.

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His latest books are The Fall of the House of Walworth and Early Autumn. 
(September 2011)

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.


Rebecca West (1892-1983) was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, the youngest of three daughters of Charles Fairfield, a journalist in London, and Isabel Mackenzie, a talented pianist who supported her family by giving music lessons. Fairfield was a brilliant storyteller who entertained his daughters with tales of wild adventures in America and Australia, but he was moody and unreliable, and in 1901 he left his wife and children to go to Sierra Leone, where he hoped to start a pharmaceutical plant. The plan failed, and he returned to London, though not to his family, dying when Cicily was fourteen. Inspired by such stars of the stage as Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Cicily hoped to become an actress, and in 1910 she enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Art. Soon, however, she abandoned her theatrical ambitions and joined the staff of the feminist journal The Freewoman, for which she began to write regularly under the name of Rebecca West (adopted after playing that character in a performance of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm). Among Rebecca West’s protean accomplishments are critical studies of two writers she deeply admired, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a vast work about pre-World War II Yugoslavia that combines history, political analysis, and vivid descriptions of travel; The Meaning of Treason (1947); and several novels, beginning with The Return of the Soldier (1918) and including The Fountain Overflows (1956), which is closely modeled on the events of her own childhood.

Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His most recent book is The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. (June 2011)

Dan Chiasson’s latest book of poetry, Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, is now out in paperback. He teaches at Wellesley. (January 2012)

Eyal Press is a 2011 Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing writer at The Nation. His book Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times will be published next February. (November 2011)

Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Early Auden, Later Auden, and many essays on (and editions of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon.

John Allen Paulos is Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of Innumeracy and, most recently, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. (April 2010)

Blair Worden is Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway College, London. His latest book is The English Civil Wars 1640-1660. (April 2010)

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)

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

G.W. Bowersock is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book is From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition.
 (December 2011)

Claire Messud’s most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. (December 2011)

David Miliband is Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. (April 2010)

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She lives in New York.

Sanford Schwartz is the author of Christen Købke and 
William Nicholson. (December 2011)

Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice in Robes, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Freedom’s Law. He is the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact.”

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, based on essays from the New York Review.

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He is also Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (February 2012)