Susan Sontag

David Rieff

A second volume of journals shares intimate reflections on the writer's artistic and political development during a trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War and throughout her film-making years in Sweden before the dawn of the Reagan era.

Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Untitled (Essays on Feminism)

A Son's Memoir

Swimming in a Sea of Death

Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Drawing on firsthand reporting from war zones around the world, David Rieff shows us what aid workers do in the field and the growing gap between their noble ambitions and their actual capabilities for alleviating suffering. He describes how many humanitarian organizations have moved from their founding principle of neutrality, which gave them access to victims, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing. By calling for intervention, humanitarian organizations risk being seen as taking sides in a conflict and thus jeopardizing their access to victims. And by overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers. Rieff concludes that if humanitarian organizations are to do what they do best -- alleviate suffering -- they must reclaim their independence.

Humanitarianism in Crisis

A Bed for the Night

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!"
So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.
Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag's voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag's complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself—all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

Journals of Susan Sontag #1

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

In a groundbreaking book based on six years of reporting, leading expert on humanitarian aid and development David Rieff offers a review of whether the end of extreme poverty and widespread hunger are within our reach. Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and development experts agree that the eradication of hunger is an essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade, the prices of wheat, soy and rice have soared. This has condemned the hundreds of millions of the world's population who live on less than one dollar per day to a state of hunger and insecurity. Rieff searches for the causes of this food security crisis, as well as what lies behind the failures to respond to disaster: failures to address climate change, poor governance, and misguided optimism. Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, as well as the interventions of celebrity campaigners, whose business-led solutions rob development of political urgency. He dismisses the idle hope of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that food scarcity can be solved by technological innovation alone, The path ahead, Rieff reminds us, demands we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and understand that what is at stake is a political challenge we are failing to confront.--Adapted from book jacket.

food, justice, and money in the twenty-first century

The reproach of hunger

A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

Historical Memory and Its Ironies

In Praise of Forgetting

Paolo Dilonardo

Anne Jump

Essays and Speeches

At the Same Time

David Rieff looks at a city that was long the epitome of the American Dream and is now, for many, the emblem of the American urban nightmare. Writing before the riots of 1992, Rieff found not a city of dreams but a city of bitter contradictions. A city that, like the United States itself, was being transformed by immigrants and refugees from Latin America and East Asia from an extension of Europe to a diverse patchwork of the peoples of the world. This is an L.A. that has never been described before. With a new afterword.

Los Angeles

Susan Sontagrs"s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance and deep curiosity about art, politics and the writerrs"s responsibility to the world have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays written in the last years of Sontagrs"s life, which reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, and on political activism as an ethical duty, and boldly address the dilemmas of post-9/11 America . A passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers.

This is a personal narrative as well as a book about Miami at the moment in the mid-1980s when the transformation of the city by its Cuban exile population was achieving critical mass. Rieff looks at Miami as America's New Havana, with a nod to the image fostered by TV's Miami Vice - an easy-going recital of his visits with Miami's most influential Cuban leaders, ranging from moderates to possibly murderous, anti-Castro politicos, along with tours of the city's now-famed Calle Ocho.

Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America

Going to Miami

A profile of exiled Cubans living in Miami focuses on their dreams, their feelings about their new country and the one they left behind, and their impact on the town of Miami

Cuba in the Heart of Miami

The Exile

Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1964

The author turns his critical eye to the City of Angels, discussing L.A.'s gridlocked freeways, immigrant neighborhoods, posh Beverly Hills, popular culture, health consciousness, and more, and speculates on the city's future.

LOS ANGELES

Un relato honesto y conmovedor de los últimos meses de la vida de Susan Sontag, escrito por su hijo. Como reportero de guerra, David Rieff ha cubierto la mayoría de los conflictos de los últimos veinte años. Sin embargo, la batalla más dura que le tocó presenciar comenzó en la primavera de 2004, cuando a su madre, Susan Sontag, le fue diagnosticada una leucemia incurable que acabaría con su vida ese mismo año. Rieff narra conmovedoramente la experiencia de estar junto a ella -mujer de insaciable curiosidad y con un deseo infinito de vivir- los últimos meses de su agonía y sus propios sentimientos encontrados: la culpa tanto por no ser suficiente consuelo como por apoyarla en la idea de que sería capaz de imponerse a la enfermedad. Recorriendo los diarios y las cartas de su madre que Rieff leyó después de su fallecimiento y los textos de otros grandes escritores sobre la muerte, este libro proporciona un retrato íntimo de losúltimos días de Sontag y una profunda meditación sobre la mortalidad. Brutalmente honesto y conmovedor, es una bellísima elegía. Reseñas: «Tanto una crónica desde la vanguardia de los tratamientos contra el cáncer como un relato íntimo, fascinante y conmovedor sobre la enfermedad final de su madre, Un mar de muerte es un libro valiente y de una sombría belleza.» Oliver Sacks «Un encuentro demoledor con la realidad de la medicina y una asombrosa experiencia literaria. Una obra de la mayor originalidad, calidad artística y sinceridad.» Janet Malcolm

Recuerdos de un hijo

Un mar de muerte

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980: Susan Sontag

Why have we failed to address the crisis of hunger in the twenty-first century? In 2000 the world’s leaders and experts agreed that the eradication of hunger was the essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade the price of wheat, soya and rice have spiraled, seen by many as the cause of the widening poverty gap and political unrest from the Arab Spring to Latin America. This food crisis has condemned the bottom billion of the world’s population who live on less than $1 a day to a state of constant hunger. In The Reproach of Hunger, leading expert on humanitarian aid and development David Rieff goes in search of the causes of this food security crisis, as well as the reasons behind the failures to respond to the disaster. In addition to the failures to address climate change, poor governance and misguided optimism, Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, with such organizations as the Gates Foundation spending more than the World Health Organization on food relief. The invention of the celebrity campaigner—from Bono to Jeffrey Sachs—have championed business-led solutions that have robbed development of its political urgency. The hope is that the crisis of food scarcity can be solved by a technological innovation. In response Rieff demands that we rethink the fundamental causes of the world’s grotesque inequalities and see the issue as a political challenge we are all failing to confront.

Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century

The Reproach of Hunger

Both a memoir and an investigation, Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate, and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity. Rieff offers no easy answers. Instead, his intensely personal book is a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. In his most profound work, this brilliant writer confronts the blunt feelings of the survivor -- the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough. And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, to try almost anything in order to go on living. Drawing on his mother's heroic struggle, paying tribute to her doctors' ingenuity and faithfulness, and determined to tell what happened to them all, Swimming in a Sea of Death subtly draws wider lessons that will be of value to others when they find themselves in the same situation.

In Against Remembrance, David Rieff provocatively argues that the business of remembrance, particularly of the great tragedies of the past, are policitised events of highly selective memory. Rather than ending injustices, as we expect it to, collective memory in so many cases dooms us to an endless cycle of vengeance. Humanity, he says, simply cannot cope with the true ambivalence of historical events. And if we remember only partially, how can our memories serve us, or our society, as well as we hope?

Against Remembrance

The author turns his critical eye to the City of Angels, discussing L.A.'s gridlocked freeways, immigrant neighborhoods, posh Beverly Hills, popular culture, health consciousness, and more, and speculates on the city's future

David Rieff

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