To Read & To Write

Who is Susan Sontag? You may have heard her name before. The first time I heard her name was as an undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago while pursuing my Bachelor's Degree in Cultural Studies, probably around 2007. The class was assigned to read Notes on Camp  . I'm not sure I understood then, as I'm not so sure I understand it now, but this is what fascinated me: that an intellectual, an intellectual woman, was writing about culture, specifically commercial  culture in a completely unique way, opening up the realm of criticism to daily observance, witticism, and playful wisdom. At that time, the big buzz around her may have died down, though I doubt it. This was the first time I truly engaged in academia beyond the high school classroom, and the only high school classrooms I cared about were Music, Biology and English. So I had no access to this world up until this point. What I'm getting at: Susan Sontag was never a celebrity to me, I did not have preconceiv...

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 i...