Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
Written by Temple Stark
Published May 10, 2003
Published May 10, 2003
Whatever the name Susan Sontag evokes in you, this book is not filled with words but photos. Photography is, after all, why she first became famous. Pretty much. Still, the book is author-philosophical in nature.
Photography books nowadays seem a luxury. But they often offer as many nterpretations as novels and "word-filled" books.
[Actually I just saw Amazon says it was released in February 2002. I thought it was this year. [It seems maybe a misprint ???] The publisher's site though, says February 2003.
The New Republic review. (Access to this review is free) (Their Arts and Books section is generally pan-partisan)
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- Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
- Published: May 10, 2003
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- Section: Books
- Writer: Temple Stark
- Temple Stark's BC Writer page
- Temple Stark's personal site
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There are other reviews as well. Charles Simic has reviewed it for The New York Review Of Books, saying "Men and women who find themselves in such circumstances, one says to oneself, do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. Such photographs preserve, however tenuously, the mark of some person's suffering in the great mass of faceless and anonymous victims. We ought to be grateful to Susan Sontag for reminding us of this."
Matt Jones of Frownland gives a mini-review of the book, including a link to a three-hour interview (in RealPlayer format) with Susan Sontag.
Michiko Kakutani reviews the book for the New York Times in which Susan Sontag is described as "A Writer Who Begs to Differ...With Herself"
Christopher Hitchens reviewed the book for the New York Observer, saying about Susan Sontag that "She knows as well as anybody about the war-relish record of Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, as well as the pacifism of Robert Lowell, Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy. So it's a cause for regret that she doesn't resolve to answer her own chromosomal questions, except by posing another one."
In Britain's The Observer, someone identified by the initials "BY" picks Regarding the Pain Of Others as one of the 50 hits of the summer (#11, in fact) saying: "With the screen burn from Iraq still fresh in our collective memory, Susan Sontag investigates the connection between art, news and politics in contemporary depictions of war and terrorism, from paintings by Goya to exhibits of atrocities in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and New York City. In Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag argues that although we're inundated more than ever by stark visual evidence of the pain of others, we have yet to increase our capacity to do something about it. This must change, she urges; we must effect a transition from spectator to witness. 'We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes_ That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer_ stubbornly feels. And they are right.'"