Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–63
By Susan Sontag
336 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Even as a teenager she was avid for life, literature, art, music; she was also self-doubting and desperate for approval. She saw romantic love as "giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin." Now, four years after Susan Sontag's death, her son, David Rieff, has made the difficult decision to expose the private passions of this American cultural icon by publishing the first of three projected volumes, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963), an evolutionary history of an insatiable mind.