Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) was an American author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily dealt with campaigning against nuclear weapons. Personal Schell was born in New York City on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired Human Rights Watch, and Marjorie Bertha. He studied at Dalton School in New York and The Putney School in Vermont, later on graduating from Harvard University in 1965, in Far Eastern history. Then he spent a year learning Japanese at the International Christian University in Tokyo. He was the brother of Suzanne Schell Pearce, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and 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 was a graduate of The Putney School in Putney, Vermont. Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014 at his home in Brooklyn, with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused by Agent Orange. His last years were spent in research on climate change for an unwritten book he titled The Human Shadow. Career Schell wrote The Village of Ben Suc when he stopped at Vietnam in 1966, en route back to the United States from Tokyo. The book started as a series of articles in the New Yorker. At just 24, he managed a press pass to Saigon from The Harvard Crimson, whose correspondents helped him to cover the war. He wrote: "Faithful to the initial design, Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins, scorching again the burned foundations of the houses and pulverizing for a second time the heaps of rubble, in the hope of collapsing tunnels too deep and well hidden for the bulldozers to crush—as though, having decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed." His next book, The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, published in 1968, also drew a graphic picture of the devastating effects of American bombings and ground operations on Quảng Ngãi Province and Quảng Tín Province in South Vietnam, as he was a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, writing particularly on the destruction of Ben Suc. His work appeared