On Mortality and Modern Medicine - David Rieff

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/02/02/David_Rieff_Swimming_in_a_Sea_of_Death

David Rieff, son of the late author Susan Sontag, gives his thoughts on modern medicine and mortality.

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David Rieff talks about Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir and an investigation, and 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 Sontag's 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 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.

David Rieff is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of seven previous books, including the acclaimed At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City - Cody's Books

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[MrWatchdawg77]

According to journalist Christopher Hitchens, Sontag later recanted this statement, saying that "it slandered cancer patients".

Slandered cancer patients?!!!

[MrWatchdawg77]

Sontag drew criticism for writing in the 1967 Partisan Review that:

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."[21]