Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Susan Sontag has written a small, liberating book that could become the cancer patient's Common Sense. First TB, then cancer, she perceives, have stood for enormities. Because their causes appeared to be multiple and were (as yet) unknown, because they struck at individuals, they were regarded as mysterious afflictions and construed, according to the fashions of their times, as diseases of passion thwarted (TB) or passion repressed (cancer). But while TB conferred a romantic, even spiritual distinction on its victims (Mimi, Byron, Little Eva), and became the sign of a superior nature, the dark side of creativity, a pretext for idleness and travel--cancer, viewed no less as ""a form of self-expression,"" or self-caused, draws the opprobrium attached increasingly in our time to repression of emotion. Freud's cancer, Wilhelm Reich contended, ""began when Freud, naturally passionate and 'very unhappily married,' yielded to resignation."" And in his train, studies of the so-called psychological causes of cancer continue to proliferate--though, as Sontag points out, who does not sometimes despair? Cancer has also become, by association, a public enemy, identified variously with environmental pollution, urban blight, Watergate, the Jews (by the Nazis), ""the white race"" (by SS, she confesses, during the Vietnam War). ""The modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots,"" demoralizing to patients, dangerous--a call to violence--in political discourse. Only when cancer is better understood will it ""be possible to compare something to a cancer without implying either a fatalistic diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor."" The persuasive simplicity of the argument, and its reach, also call to mind Tom Paine. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford University. She was the author of 17 books including four novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, and eight works of nonfiction. Her novels are The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. On Photography received the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Art in America. She also wrote and directed four feature films and stage plays in the United States and Europe. She died from leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71.

(Bowker Author Biography)