The Christian Science Monitor

Susan Sontag’s razor-sharp intellect is captured in new biography

If, as Camus once quipped, an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself, then maybe we can describe that strangest of all creatures, the public intellectual, as someone whose mind society watches. Such a mind provides a kind of vicarious reactor whose lightning-fast formulations help everybody else to think more clearly. 

Susan Sontag, immortalized in the photo by Richard Avedon that stares out from the cover of Benjamin Moser’s new book “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” was many things: a novelist,

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