Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

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.

David Rieff has written a number of books, the most recent of which is The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century. He currently resides in New York City.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780743299473
ISBN 10	0743299477
Title	Swimming in a Sea of Death
Author	David Rieff
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2008-12-30
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.