At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

• Nonfiction. By Susan Sontag. Farrar, Strausand Giroux, $23.Grade:A

Book in a nutshell: Sontag had a beautiful mind: shapely, sharp, incisive and quick. Her writing shuttles from the general to the particular, from metaphor to fact, from photograph to philosophy, with the same ease that the rest of us devote to breathing in and out.

At the Same Time is a collection of speeches and essays written since 2001. It's a book she had been outlining and planning in the years prior to her death from cancer in December 2004. While she might have revised it if she'd had the time, the book does not have an unfinished feel at all.

As a writer, Sontag was never afraid to take on the big topics, and it's all here: beauty, freedom, civilization, war, etc. Whether her subject is photography (which she understood implicitly), the consequences of a 9/11 world (which she tackled fearlessly, often criticizing the Bush administration) or the genre of obscure Russian writers of the 1920s, you gladly go along for the ride as Sontag piles insight upon insight with a prose style that's as breathtaking as it is inspirational.

Listen to this passage from a speech titled "Literature is Freedom": "A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding."

Best tidbit: While people often think of Sontag as the consummate New York intellectual, she actually was born in southern Arizona, where, she writes, her elementary school teacher, Mr. Starkie, had her reading Goethe by age 10.

Pros: Sontag's enthusiasm for literature is contagious and her knowledge is encyclopedic. Who else could take an essay on translation and manage to cover points of view ranging from St. Jerome to the English-speaking call-center operators in India?

Cons: Sontag's passions can be obscure. Writers like Anna Banti and Leonid Tsypkin aren't exactly household names, even in most literary homes. But that's the joy of discovery.

Final word: It's bittersweet to realize this is the last collection of relatively recent writing by Sontag. More journals are on their way. But we'll never see such brilliant essays as these again.