This was a really quick, rather interesting read. Sontag's essential argument is that the saturation of images of violence through the modern media has begun to inure us to the pain of other human beings. She traces the history of war photography, network decisions about which footage to air, etc. and makes a rather compelling and humane argument. I think it's just about the perfect length, I believe I read it in a couple of evenings and then passed it on to my mom. ( )

In this book, Sontag demonstrates her mastery of the art of eloquent outrage, an art that requires subtlety and restraint, but also an art that, when done well, changes the way you see things every day. She argues that while photographs of devastation, whether from war or natural disasters or human cruelty, are often regarded as "truth," in reality nothing could be more deceiving. When we see a haunting image of some nameless person suffering, our heart goes out to them, but it takes our minds away from more insidious implications. -Emily

This small collection of essays, which explores the ways in which images of war and suffering can effect a populace, was the last thing Sontag published before she died in 2004. In it, she goes through a series of depictions of war and examines what each meant to the intended audience, to the artist, and to posterity.

Read the rest of my review of Regarding the Pain of Others on my blog, The Nerd is the Word.

http://nerdword.blogspot.com/2006/10/... ( )

This is a powerful and profound book that forces us to rethink our relationship to the steady stream of horrific images of human suffering from locales both nearby and exotic that have increasingly saturated our lives as the mass media have developed over the past two centuries. Sontag rejects simple notions about what it means to, through the media, be specatators to the horrible suffering of others. (E.g., that images of suffering make us callous and indifferent to suffering or move us to a genuine sympathy with others.) Rather, she calls for what might be calld an ethics of spectatorship that requires us to 1) move beyond mere sympathy to analyze our relationship to the suffering we see, and to stop it if we can; and 2) to acknowledge the irreducible, incomparable quality of the suffering of others -- the uniqueness of suffering must be acknowledged, as well as the impossiblity of those who do not suffer to fully understand. ( )