Annotation for "Sontag: Her Life & Work" by Benjamin Moser (published 2019)

For readers of the late Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser's Sontag: Her Life and Work, will help retrieve her well-known critical essays and novels, such as Illness As A Metaphor and Notes On Camp, and place them in the light of her deeply fraught childhood and her struggles with identity. Two concerns, amidst a vast number of them, include the alcoholism of her mother and Sontag's acceptance of her homosexuality in a still largely conservative America. Moreover, Moser traces Sontag's life (spanning 1933 - 2004) as well as her ancestry by using historical documentation, most notably Sontag's actual diary entries, in which a paradoxical politics concerning the idea of authenticity reveals itself, as well as another major theme recurrent in Sontag's work: the division between mind and body. What might make this book stand out for many readers is quite surprising: Mosers' grasp on the multi-faceted layers of Jewish culture and history in the U.S. and abroad and more importantly, what Jewishness might mean for a political subject such as Susan Sontag. Quoting many of her most profound passages from publications, Moser explains how this important and canonical American writer rose to admirable fame the world over.