Contents

October 27, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Stanley Hoffmann is Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard. His most recent books are Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy and Rousseau and Freedom, coedited with Christie McDonald.


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.


Frederick Seidel’s new book of poems is Nice Weather. (May 2013)

Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels; the most recent is Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel. He teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Arnold Relman is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and the author of A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care.
 (October 2012)

David Thomson, a British film critic and historian based in the United States, is the author of more than twenty books, including the prestigious reference works *Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films* and *The New Biographical Dictionary of Film*. He has been a regular contributor and film critic for *The New York Times*, *Film Comment, Movieline*, *The New Republic*, and *Salon*. He lives in San Francisco with his family and has taught at Dartmouth College.

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

Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, was the author of seventeen books of fiction. He died in 2005. (November 2011)

William D. Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale. (March 2012)

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.

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her new book, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, will be published in the US in 
September. She has just been appointed Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. (May 2013)

Jonathan Mirsky is the former East Asia Editor of The Times of London. (June 2013)

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.

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

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.

Jeff Madrick writes an economics column for Harper’s Magazine, is editor of Challenge Magazine, and is director of the Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Roo­sevelt Institute. His most recent book is Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America.

Frank Partnoy is the George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego and is author, most recently, of The Match King: Ivar Krueger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals.

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 Albright is founder and President of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., and the author of Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies. (October 2011)

Adam Kirsch is a Senior Editor at The New Republic and a Contributing Editor to Tablet. His most recent book is Why Trilling Matters.
 (May 2013)

Stanley Wells is General Editor of the Oxford and Penguin editions of Shakespeare. His most recent book is Shakespeare, Sex, and Love appeared in paperback in July. (August 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)

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.

Caroline Moorehead’s new book, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, will be published in November. (October 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.

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

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)

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.

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States.