Notes on Self
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh:
Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
by Susan Sontag
Edited by David Rieff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
523 pages, $30.

EVER SINCE reviewing Reborn, the first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, in these pages (May-June, 2009), I’ve been eager to read the next installment of her observations about the world. The three-volume series is being edited by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who describes this volume as “a political bildungsroman … in the sense of a person’s education, her coming to maturity.”

This volume covers Sontag’s life from age 31 to 47. During this period, she wrote some of her best-known essays, including the epic “Notes on Camp” (1964).