The 1992 volume contains essays reflecting resonant perceptions on the most immediate concerns of contemporary culture, from popular songs to opera, best sellers to literary classics. John Updike writes about Mickey Mouse and photographs. Jamaica Kincaid's piece is on "On Seeing England for the First Time"; Vicki Hearne writes on "What's Wrong with Animal Rights," and Leonard Michaels' "The Zipper" pays tribute to Rita Hayworth. Stanley Elkin's hilarious "On Overrated Masterpieces" looks at everything from Hamlet to Leonardo da Vinci; David Rieff shreds the rhetoric of the "recovery" movement and the "politics of victimhood"; and Elizabeth Hardwick reexamines the prairie poets. Sontag's introduction presents a brief history of the form, from its emergence in ancient Rome to the timeless perfection of Montaigne and its 19th century flowering under the pens of such thinkers as Hazlitt and Emerson. ISBN 0-395-59935-0