SOURCE: Dyer, Geoff. “The Way We Live Now.” New Statesman 2, no. 41 (17 March 1989): 34-5.

In the following review, Dyer judges Sontag as a master of the essay form, praising her work AIDS and Its Metaphors as well as the earlier essay Illness as Metaphor.

Twelve years ago, when Susan Sontag became a cancer patient, she felt compelled to write a book about the disease, not a confessional account of the struggle against illness—“a narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea”—but a broader genealogy and history of the metaphors associated with disease. Like a vaccine for which the world had been waiting, Illness as Metaphor achieved the immediate status of a classic, one of those books which seem always to have been around.

Disease, she argues in that book, should be seen as just that, otherwise the sick have to suffer not only...