Table of Contents
Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
John Ashbery, Elizabeth Hardwick, Diane Johnson, et al. Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Charles Simic, Making It New 
Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris Catalog of the exhibition by Leah Dickerman, with essays by Brigid Doherty, Dorothea Dietrich, Sabine T. Kriebel, Michael R. Taylor, Janine Mileaf, and Matthew S. Witkovsky
Russell Baker, Glimpses
Let Me Finish by Roger Angell
Michael Kimmelman, All in the Family
Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 by Stephen Walsh
Witold Rybczynski, Shipping News
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed the World by Brian J. Cudahy
Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
Sarah Kerr, Burdens of Inheritance
Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey
Jonathan Aaron, Skills (poem)
Peter W. Galbraith, Mindless in Iraq
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor
Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco by David L. Phillips
The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq by Fouad Ajami
Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq by Michael Goldfarb
Pu Zhiqiang, 'June Fourth' Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise
John Updike, The Artist as Prospector
Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape Catalog of the exhibition by Gail S. Davidson, Floramae McCarron-Cates,Barbara Bloemink, Sarah Burns, and Karal Ann Marling
Alma Guillermoprieto, A New Bolivia?
Al Alvarez, The Man Who Rowed Away
Rapids by Tim Parks
Talking About It by Tim Parks
David Cole, Why the Court Said No
Max Rodenbeck, The Time of the Shia
Reaching for Power: The Shi'a in the Modern Arab World by Yitzhak Nakash
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future by Vali Nasr
Christopher Benfey, The View from the Bridge
Brookland by Emily Barton
George M. Fredrickson, Redcoat Liberation
Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty by Cassandra Pybus
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution by Gary B. Nash
Jeremy Waldron, How Judges Should Judge
Justice in Robes by Ronald Dworkin
Stanley Hoffmann, The Foreign Policy the US Needs
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama
Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt
Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower by John Brady Kiesling
Letters
Roger Hurwitz, Michael Massing, The Israel Lobby
Daniel C. Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, et al. 'Breaking the Spell'
Contributors
Jonathan Aaron's new collection of poems, Journey to the Lost City, has just been published. (August 2006)
Al Alvarez's most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in these pages. (May 2008)
John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
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. (November 2008)
Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South, has just been published. (December 2008)
David Cole is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the award-winning author of several books, including 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).
George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of US History Emeritus at Stanford. His most recent books are Racism: A Short History and Not Just Black and White, a collection co-edited with Nancy Foner. (August 2006)
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)
Alma Guillermoprieto often writes on Latin America in these pages. Her most recent book is Dancing with Cuba. (December 2008)
Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916) has been a frequent contributor to The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, which she helped found in 1963. Her books include the novels The Simple Truth, The Ghostly Lover, and Sleepless Nights, the essay collection A View of My Own, and The Selected Letters of William James, for which she acted as editor.
Stanley Hoffmann is Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard. His forthcoming book is Chaos and Violence. (August 2006)
Diane Johnson’s new novel, Lulu in Marrakech, will be published this month. (October 2008)
Sarah Kerr, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, lives near Washington, D.C. (December 2008)
Michael Kimmelman is chief art critic of The New York Times . He is now based in Berlin, writing the Abroad column for the Times on culture and society across Europe. He is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. (September 2008)
Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences. (January 2009)
Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.
Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.
Edmund S. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His most recent book, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America, was published in 2004. (October 2008)
Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.
Max Rodenbeck is The Economist's Mideast Correspondent. He is based in Cairo. (January 2009)
Witold Rybczynski is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, and is architecture critic for Slate. His new book on American building, Last Harvest, has just been published. (May 2007)
Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and, most recently, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a new book of poems My Noiseless Entourage came out in the spring of 2005.
Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, and Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece and Sugar Cane a children's book. She lives in New York.
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continues to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards. His most recent books are the novel Terrorist and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.
Gore Vidal's most recent novel is The Golden Age. (February 2002)
Jeremy Waldron is the author of Law and Disagreement and The Dignity of Legislation. He is University Professor in the Law School at NYU. (May 2008)
Pu Zhiqiang is a partner in the Huayi Law Firm in Beijing, where he specializes in cases of defamation, press freedom, product safety, and other aspects of public interest law. (August 2006)
