Table of Contents
Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
Michael Kimmelman, The Last Act 
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
Rory Stewart, The Queen of the Quagmire
Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell
Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach
Gertrude Bell: The Lady of Iraq by H.V.F. Winstone
Review of the Civil Administration in Mesopotamia by Gertrude Bell
The Gertrude Bell Project
Sanford Schwartz, Local Hero
Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney with a Catalogue of His Works by Linda Bantel and Peter H. Hassrick, with essays by Sarah E. Boehme and Mark F. Bockrath, edited by Kathleen Luhrs
Patricia Meehan, Cruel Allied Occupiers
After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh
Charles Rosen, The Best Book on Mozart
W.A. Mozart by Hermann Abert, edited by Cliff Eisen, and translated from the German by Stewart Spencer
Larry McMurtry, Our Favorite Bandit
Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride by Michael Wallis
Russell Baker, The Conservative Betrayed
The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington by Robert D. Novak
Anne Applebaum, How Hitler Could Have Won
The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II by Andrew Nagorski
Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War by Rodric Braithwaite
Charles Simic, The Cat Went Out for Good
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 by Robert Creeley
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 by Robert Creeley
Jeremy Waldron, Is This Torture Necessary?
Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror by David Cole and Jules Lobel
Freeman Dyson, Working for the Revolution
Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Gino Segrè
Richard J. Bernstein, Good War Gone Bad
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam
David Bromwich, The Fever Dream of Mrs. Stowe
The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited with an introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins
Jonathan Freedland, Who Is Gordon Brown?
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister by Tom Bower
Gordon Brown: Speeches, 1997–2006 edited by Wilf Stevenson
Courage: Eight Portraits by Gordon Brown
John Gross, Empson: Argufying Against Mufflement
William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians by John Haffenden
Selected Letters of William Empson edited by John Haffenden
Luc Sante, The Hidden Master of the Human Comedy
Norman Rush, Vietnam: Portraits from a Tragedy
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Christopher de Bellaigue, Turkey at the Turning Point?
Dan Agin, Frank J. Sulloway, 'How to Inherit IQ': The Fetal Question
Letters
Daniel Wilsher, Ronald Dworkin, Lotto for Learning?
Mitchel L. Galishoff, The Real E-You
Mark Keshishian, The Birth of Portnoy
Sheila Hillier, Dolores in the East End
Contributors
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Poland. (October 2008)
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)
Richard J. Bernstein, formerly Time magazine’s correspondent in China and a correspondent in France and Germany for The New York Times, is the author of Ultimate Journey. (October 2007)
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. (November 2008)
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), and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). 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.
Jonathan Freedland is an editorial-page columnist for The Guardian. In July he was awarded the David Watt Prize for “Bush’s Amazing Achievement,” published in these pages in June 2007.
(October 2008)
John Gross’s most recent book is A Double Thread, a memoir. He is the editor of The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, which will be published in paperback in September. (May 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)
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.
Patricia Meehan is a historian and former BBC documentary producer. She is the author of A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British, 1945–50. (October 2007)
Charles Rosen's most recent book is Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist. (November 2008)
Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel.
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.
Sanford Schwartz's essays and reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers. (January 2009)
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.
Rory Stewart is the former Coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces in Iraq and the author of The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. He now lives in Kabul, where he is the Chief Executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. (October 2007)
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)
Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize. He lives in Tehran with his wife and two children.
