Jonathan Schell

Schell giving a reading at the Occupy Wall Street event Occupy Town Square, in Tompkins Square Park in New York, February 2012

Jonathan Edward Schell (born 1943) is an author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily deals with campaigning against nuclear weapons.

Career

His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch. The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. He was most recently a Distinguished Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in The New Yorker (subsequently published as The Fate of the Earth), which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. He has been a persistent advocate for disarmament, and a world free of nuclear weapons.

In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the invasion of Iraq. He has since commented, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."

Personal

He is the younger brother of Orville Schell, former dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. and current Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a graduate of The Putney School in Putney, Vermont.

Criticism

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, David Greenberg called The Fate of the Earth an “overwrought doomsday polemic.” In Slate.com, Michael Kinsley characterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and concluded that it “may be the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people.”

During his tenure at The New Yorker, Schell was referred to by some staff members as "the incredibly boring Jonathan Schell."

Selected publications

• The Village of Ben Suc (1967)
• The Military Half (1968)
• The Time of Illusion (1976)
• The Fate of the Earth (1982)
• The Abolition (1984)
• History in Sherman Park (1987)
• The Real War (1988)
• Observing the Nixon Years (1989)
• The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (1998)
• The Unfinished Twentieth Century (2001)
• The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003),
• A Hole in the World (2004)
• The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007)

External links

• Biography from the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
• Biography from The Nation
• Biography from The Globalist
• 2007 Video Interview with Jonathan Schell about "The Seventh Decade" on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
• The Gift of Time
• Smoking Guns and Mushroom Clouds