Books like Regarding the Pain of Others
Sontag returns to her On Photography territory a quarter-century later to ask what we do with images of atrocity, and whether there is a form of looking that is not a kind of spectator-sport.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Regarding the Pain of Others
On Photography
Six essays on what it means to see the world through photographs, and what the camera consumes, numbs and moralises away.
The Rebel
Camus's essay on rebellion and revolution: how the refusal to accept injustice turns, in history and in thought from the Marquis de Sade to the Soviet state, into murder.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus asks whether life is worth living once you accept that the world will never answer the demand for meaning, and finds his answer in Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up the mountain forever.
The Conquest of Happiness
Russell's practical case for how ordinary people can be happier: the causes of unhappiness, from boredom and envy to fear of public opinion, and what can be done about them.
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Paz's essays on the Mexican character, on the pachuco, the fiesta, death, and the masks Mexicans wear.
The Collected Schizophrenias
Thirteen essays on living with schizoaffective disorder, the diagnosis, the institutions and Wang's own experience of a high-functioning illness, written with a clinician's precision.
Laughter
Bergson's essay on the comic: what makes us laugh at a person, a phrase or a situation, and what laughter does for a society.
Trick Mirror
Nine essays on how late-2010s America scams itself, the internet as self, the wedding industry, athleisure and optimisation, written from inside the trap by someone who does not pretend to be above it.
Crowds and Power
Canetti's study of crowds, how they form, grow and turn, and of power and the people who hold it, drawn from myth, history and anthropology.
A Room of One's Own
Woolf's lecture-turned-book on why women who want to write need five hundred a year and a lockable door, in a voice that invented its own form of argument.
The Captive Mind
Miłosz's study of how the writers and intellectuals of Eastern Europe came to accept Stalinist rule, through four portraits of friends he calls Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.