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| | The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-01) |
 | | Susan Sontag, who wrote for this magazine on and off for more than thirty years, died last Tuesday, to everyone’s surprise, for though she had been in treatment for cancer intermittently since the nineteen-seventies, she never got it into her head—or, therefore, into anyone else’s—that this disease might kill her. |
 | | In these writings Sontag combined a passion for new ways of seeing (Godard, Artaud, “happenings”) with a fidelity to classical values (truth, beauty, decency), and thus built a bridge for us, showed us how to cross over into the modern. |
 | | A committed leftist, she praised the regimes of Cuba and North Vietnam in the sixties, and she described the “white race” as “the cancer of human history.” This won her much antipathy from the right. |
| www.newyorker.com /talk/content/?050110ta_talk_acocella (701 words) |
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