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About
Sontag's incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer's responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth-century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen-essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
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Reviews
"Not only did [her work] serve what should be an essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, weird work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter . . . it did so in a notable un-weird manner. Thoroughly trained in literature and philospohy, Sontag applied the standard of the past--truth, beauty, transcendence, spirituality--to the new art of the sixties, with its ali
Joan Acocella, The New Yorker with praise for author Susan Sontag
"[Sontag is] one of our very few brand-name intellectuals. . .the bearer of the standard of high seriousness in a culture that has essentially capitulated to the easy lifting of the ironic mode or the ready clasp of pure entertainment."
Sven Birkets, The Yale Review with praise for author Susan Sontag
"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, as smart as she's supposed to be, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'"
Adam Begley, The New York Observer with praise for author Susan Sontag