To write a positive book review without the language of back-covers and book-flaps is noteworthy. Sontag almost makes me want to read these "rare finds", even Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden (notwithstanding Elkin's own favorable review), though imo Dostoevsky is a hack. The essay on Victor Serge may be the most interesting of this section, though her critique of Stalinism ("unfree society, plus all the murders") lacks insight beyond what any American at the time could have written. Yet there is also the interesting observation that the revolutionary is necessarily obligated to do the wrong thing (not a wholesale condemnation). Elsewhere her "critique of capital", mass culture, and U.S. imperialism all lack substance. (This is the fate of writing for a "public speech" - moreso for award acceptance speeches - which are, at the very least, "made for television".)

We detect some dissonance within her award speeches. Her praise of prose for it's ability to make time stretch and the distant near, to make characters' lives close to us and the Other known - perhaps correct - is only one part of what drives the obsessive reader (Sontag herself). The secret hope of this reader is the search for the Final Book, which will put everything to right (an impossibility), and for whom Sontag's romantic vision of vast tracts of literature stretching out into eternity is one of both excitement and crushing anxiety.

Her brief Photography: A Little Summa is the best work in the collection, as always. ( )

I didn't finish the whole book before I had to return it to the library.

I read her fantastic essay, An Argument About Beauty, which I will not forget because I loved it; 1926...Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke; Loving Dostoyevsky (about Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden); Unextinguished: the Case for Victor Serge; and A Double Destiny: On Anna Banti's Artemesia. (All waiting on my shelves to be read.)

I skimmed the Laxness essay and the rest, which doesn't count as reading. I felt a failing desire to continue, not sure why, but it may have been the 9/11 pieces. I just might have overdosed on 9/11 writing, in general, and couldn't find it in me to revisit it now.

I might pick this up again another day.

I would give this book more stars on the Beauty essay alone, but I will resist the urge to be too expansive (you know how I can be). ( )

Sontag is as observational and exceptionally well written as always in this, her last collection of essays. Literary observations on Halldor Laxness, Nadine Gordimer and Victor Serge are among the highlights, as are her political meditations on contemporary ('post-postmodernist') politics. Excellent and enjoyable. ( )

From the first point of view, it has many different kinds of analysis of modern literature & for formation of Susan Sontag. It is still a way of introduction to new readers, although i less clearly of understanding in some passages. I would say that from here, I will continue to read & discovery the worlds of words across english texts ( )

A collection of Sontag´s final essays and speeches, the most personally touching is perhaps “Photography: A Little Summa.” Always questioning and always observant, Sontag writes, “A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all “human.”) But what are we to do with this knowledge–if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?” And then, “What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.” ( )