Swimming in a Sea of Death Contributor(s): Rieff, David (Author) |
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ISBN: 0743299477 ISBN-13: 9780743299473 Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Binding Type: Paperback - See All Available Formats & Editions Published: December 2008 Annotation: Both a memoir and an investigation, Rieffs tribute to his mother--writer Susan Sontag--explores her final battle with cancer and looks at the state of medical science and leading cancer physicians who combine treating patients with pursuing the cutting edge of research. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Family & Relationships | Death, Grief, Bereavement |
Dewey: B |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.2" W x 7.8" L (0.35 lbs) 192 pages |
Themes: - Topical - Death/Dying |
Features: Price on Product, Price on Product - Canadian |
Review Citations: New York Times Book Review 03/01/2009 pg. 20 |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity. Rieff offers no easy answers. Instead, his intensely personal book is a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. In his most profound work, this brilliant writer confronts the blunt feelings of the survivor -- the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough. And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, to try almost anything in order to go on living. Drawing on his mother's heroic struggle, paying tribute to her doctors' ingenuity and faithfulness, and determined to tell what happened to them all, Swimming in a Sea of Death subtly draws wider lessons that will be of value to others when they find themselves in the same situation. |
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