David Rieff’s memoir of the last, excruciatingly painful months of his mother [Susan Sontag]’s life, is as riveting as it is unremittingly harrowing. In those months, Sontag swung between despair and stubborn hope. She interrogated the Internet and her doctors, emboldened by a lifelong certainty that information equals knowledge equals power. The irony isn’t lost on Rieff that his mother, a resolute atheist, had an almost religious belief in the always onward and upward progress of scientific research. ‘Was it not…magical thinking disguised as practical research…on the false premise that with that information there would be something new and transformative that could be done?’

She made herself, her son and her friends walk an absurdly wobbling tightrope. She did not want bromides, consoling lies or blind hope; she wanted the truth. But she could not bear to hear a death sentence; anytime she looked directly at mortality, she came close to going insane. Her doctors and her retinue of companions, all of whom knew that death was imminent, had simultaneously to believe that she could live. So they cherry-picked the ominous statistics for promising news and found mandarin ways of changing the subject and not saying certain things.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune via Powells Books)