Contents

July 15, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 12

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

William Pfaff was an editor of the lay-Catholic Commonweal magazine from 1949 to 1955, and remains a contributor. His latest book is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy. (May 2013)

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.

Wyatt Mason is a Contributing Editor at Harper’s and a Contributing Writer to The New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College for 2010–2011.
 (July 2010)

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)

Charles Wright’s most recent book is Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems. (February 2012)

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic.
 (January 2013)

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)

Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, The Anthologist, was published in September 2009. (July 2010)

David Grossman, who lives near Jerusalem, is the author of The Yellow Wind, a report on life in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. His new novel, To the End of the Land, from which the excerpt in this issue is taken, will be published in September by Knopf. Jessica Cohen’s translations include David Grossman’s Her Body Knows and works by Yael Hedaya, Ronit Matalon, Amir Gutfreund, and Tom Segev. (July 2010)

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

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and the Editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab website.
 His book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century was published in April 2013.

Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His books include Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing and The Server.

John Terborgh, who has worked in the Peruvian Amazon since 1973, is Research Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke and Director of its Center for Tropical Conservation. His latest book, co-edited with James A. Estes, is Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature.
 (April 2012)

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, Eclipse, The Sea (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and Ancient Light. As Benjamin Black he has written six crime novels, including Vengeance.

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.


Hugh Eakin is a senior editor of The New York Review and edits the NYRblog. (January 2013)

Alisa Roth is acting New York bureau chief for the public radio program Marketplace. (May 2010)