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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy to be talking to David Reef, who is most recently the author of

Swimming in a Sea of death, a son's memoir.

It's published by Simon & Schuster.

David is a writer about politics as well as a political thinker, a journalist, and I would say a philosopher.

He is the son of Susan Sontag, who was one of the people I most admired during her life and most miss after her death.

His other books include at the point of a gun, Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, A Bed for the Night, Humanitarianism and Crisis, Crimes of War, which is a handbook about war crimes,

Slaughter House, a book about Bosnia, and others as well.

This is Swimming in a Sea of Death, a son's memoir.

Now, I was fascinated by the way in which this book shapes itself. You describe your mother, Susan Sontag,

as a person who believes in absolute truth and yourself as having been formed, and I quote,

or deformed by the need to understand, to form an opinion and hold it.

And you present the process of death here as one that, in a sense, challenges both procedures,

the search for absolute truth and the willingness to hold to an understood

opinion.

Well, I think that if you want to live and your chances of not living are great, as in my mother's

case, even the odds against her survival from this terrible form of blood

...