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 ...

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascismSusan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. “The most interesting ideas are heresies,” she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines.On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the c...

Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century.Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorce is not just a question of a broken marriage but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one...

A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. 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 a...

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 prices 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 w...

"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 in...

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 t...

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag's evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh follows Sontag thro...

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. th...

A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices.Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself?The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he l...

Veteran journalist David Rieff’s essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field.Writing for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The Nation to France’s Le Monde, David Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions since the Cold War waged by the West or the United Nations in the name of human rights and democrat...

This is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century.David Rieff has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.