David Sontag Rieff | |
|---|---|
 Rieff in 2017 | |
| Born | 28 September 1952 |
| Education | Lycée Français de New York |
| Alma mater | Amherst College Princeton University |
| Occupation(s) | Non-fiction writer, policy analyst |
| Children | 1 |
| Parents |
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David Rieff ( /ˈriːf/ ; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism.
Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag, [1] who was 19 years old when he was born. His father, whom Sontag divorced, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Rieff was educated at the Lycée Français de New York and attended Amherst College as a member of the class of 1974, where he studied under Benjamin DeMott. He completed college at Princeton University, graduating with an A.B. in history in 1978. [2]
Rieff was a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1978 to 1989. [2] Rieff has at various times been a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, [2] a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, [3] a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, [4] of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute, [5] and of Independent Diplomat. [6]
Rieff has published articles in newspapers and journals including The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , Le Monde , El Pais , The New Republic , World Affairs, Harper's , The Atlantic Monthly , Foreign Affairs , The Nation . [7]
Rieff has written about the Bosnian War. Despite his initial support of the tenets of Liberal internationalism, he was critical of American policies and goals in the Iraq War. [8] [9] His 2016 article in The Guardian , "The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good"—which argues that some mass atrocities are better forgotten [10] —sparked a debate at the International Center for Transitional Justice. [11]
Peter Rose, reviewing Rieff's 2008 book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir, compares it favourably to Simone de Beauvoir's 1964 A Very Easy Death; he considers the latter "perhaps the finest of filial memoirs." [1]
G. John Ikenberry, reviewing Rieff's 2005 book At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention for Foreign Affairs, called him "one of the most engaging observers of war and humanitarian emergencies in such troubled places as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq". He notes Rieff's "caution and misgivings", and finds especially compelling the essay where Rieff laments the gap between the misery and violence "outside the gates of the Western world" and the obstacles that prevent the West from assembling the strength, whether military or moral, to resolve the problems. [12]
Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006). [13]
The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf. It was a response to the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and it was intended to deter the Soviet Union, the United States' Cold War adversary, from seeking hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.
Susan Sontag was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Against Interpretation is a 1966 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," and the eponymous essay "Against Interpretation." In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact and novelty of art, instead fitting works into predetermined intellectual interpretations and emphasis on the "content" or "meaning" of a work. The book was a finalist for the Arts and Letters category of the National Book Award.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
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Vivian Gornick is an American radical feminist critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist.
James Francis Dobbins Jr. is an American diplomat who served as United States Ambassador to the European Union (1991–1993), as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (2001), and as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He was envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. In 2001, he led negotiations leading to the Bonn Agreement, and served as acting Ambassador of the United States to Afghanistan during the transitional period. He was head of international and security policy for the RAND Corporation.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America is a book by New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, proposing that the solutions to global warming and the best method to regain the United States' economic and political stature in the world are to embrace the clean energy and green technology industries. The title derives from the convergence of Hot, Flat and Crowded.
Helen Weaver was an American writer and translator. She translated over fifty books from French. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings was a Finalist for the National Book Award in translation in 1977.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
Christopher Hitchens was a prolific English-American author, political journalist and literary critic. His books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. Recognized as a public intellectual, he was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. Hitchens was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is an American writer and political analyst focused on the Middle East. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing primarily on the Middle East, Islamic militancy, counterterrorism, and intelligence. He is a former director of the Project for the New American Century's Middle East Initiative and a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Earlier in his career Gerecht was a case officer at the CIA, primarily working on Middle Eastern targets.
Elizabeth Dale Samet is an author of numerous books, essays, and reviews on United States military history.
Frederic Wehrey is an American scholar of Middle East affairs, expert on Libyan and Gulf politics, and Senior Fellow at the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wehrey earned a PhD in international relations from Oxford University.
Rajan Menon is a political scientist. He holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science at the City University of New York.
Sontag: Her Life and Work is a 2019 biography of American writer Susan Sontag written by Benjamin Moser.
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