Contents

March 25, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale. His books include Thinking the Twentieth Century, a book of conversations with Tony Judt, and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, both of which were recently published in paperback.
 (March 2013)

Michael Greenberg is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. From 2003 to 2009 he wrote the Freelance column in the TLS.
 (April 2013)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

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)

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (May 2013)

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Thomas Nagel is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at NYU. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos, was published in September. (December 2012)

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. His play, The Testament of Mary, is now being staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

Susan Dunn is Professor of Humanities at Williams. Her most recent book is Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia.
 (March 2010)

Günter Eich (1907–1972) was a member of Gruppe 47 and one of the leading postwar German poets. He won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden in 1953, and Germany’s major literary prize, the Büchner Preis, in 1959. Michael Hofmann edited the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry. His translations from Günter Eich, Angina Days: Selected Poems, will be published in April. (March 2010)

Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator. He has translated nine books by Joseph Roth and was awarded the PEN translation prize for String of Pearls. He lives in London.

Timothy Ferris is Emeritus Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, was published in February. (March 2010)

David Kaiser is Chair of the Board of Just Detention International, a health and human rights organization. (October 2012)

Lovisa Stannow is the Executive Director of Just Detention International.
 (October 2012)

Benedetta Craveri is a professor of French literature at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo, and the Istituto Universitario Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples. She regularly contributes to The New York Review of Books and to the cultural pages of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Her books include Madame du Deffand and Her World, La Vie privée du Maréchal de Richelieu, and Amanti e regine: Il potere delle donne. She is married to a French diplomat.

Miranda Robbins is Director of Publications at the American Academy in Berlin. (March 2010)

Roger Alcaly, who formerly taught economics at Columbia, is a hedge fund manager and author of The New Economy.
 (March 2010)

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

J. Hoberman’s books include Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)