Sontags Last Essays & Speeches

AT THE SAME TIME
Essays and Speeches.
By Susan Sontag. Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump.
235 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.

This volume includes her wonderful essay on after 9/11 and her warnings of the disaster of the bushbaby playpen and sacrifice of human and civil rights and justice supposedly to combat terrorism. Here follows the review from the NYT.

New York Times: Books / Sunday Book Review
September Song, a review
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Published: March 11, 2007

The amplified note of despair and loss in “At the Same Time” makes Sontag resemble one of the European “last” intellectuals she often wrote about, “that Saturnine hero of modern culture” standing alone in the ruins of history. This anguish may seem exaggerated, part of her frequently noted self-regard. But, in her later weariness with modern civilization, Sontag fulfilled a particularly American destiny. Gertrude Stein once claimed that America was the oldest country in the world, since it was the “mother of the 20th-century civilization.” Sontag, who had a tragic sense of history rarely found among her peers, never failed to absorb the lessons of her country’s old age and accumulated experience of modernity. It is why the melancholy and occasional bitter wisdom of her last writings appear to be of a mature and passionately engaged American rather than of a marginal and jaded European sensibility — one that has not only learned from the past but, by grappling vigorously with the present, can also divine, if gloomily, the future.