"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 brillianc
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
In the late 1930s, Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to report on how the inhabitants had reacted to the brutal anticlerical purges of President Calles. The Lawless Roads is his spellbinding record of that journey. Taking him through the trop
For everyone who wants to become better informed about the news, this book lays out the benchmarks for monitoring the watchdogs and governments. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, it illustrates what is legal in war
Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Drawing on firsthand reporting from war zones around the world, David Rieff shows us wh
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 ab
In a groundbreaking book, based on six years of on the ground reporting, expert David Rieff offers a masterly review about whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is within our reach as increasingly promised.Can we provide enough food for 9 b
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
