Three years before he hanged himself at age 46 on the patio of the ranch house in Claremont, Calif., that he shared with his wife, Karen Green, David Foster Wallace gave the commencement address to graduating seniors at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. In the aftermath of his suicide last September, a transcript of the address zinged around the Web like a talisman, less a funereal fetish object than a usable text in which the master ironist and jester spoke plainly, with painstaking precision, of his own method of getting beyond “the so-called ‘real world’ of men and money and power [which] hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self,” a world in which all have the “freedom” to be “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” Little, Brown has now published the speech in hardcover with the title This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

The speech is by turns angry, funny, faux-naïve (“I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech’s central stuff should sound”) and succeeds in the same way as Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction in casting a glow of enchantment over the dross of everyday life, in seeing, as Wallace puts it here, “the value of the totally obvious.” Wallace’s prescription to the Kenyon seniors on that sunny May morning was that a kind of grace could be attained by anyone willing to do the strenuous mental work of seeing all situations from outside that self-obsessed “skull-sized kingdom” and thus enter into an elective affinity with others. He sketches out what daily life will soon feel like to most of them—the “petty, frustrating crap” of trudging to the supermarket at the end of a long and tiring day—and how such internal strife can be avoided if you can short-circuit your “natural default setting … that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home” and instead imagine what the others in the supermarket are going through. “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”

Little, Brown’s handsome volume arrives just in time for well-meaning parents, uncles and aunties to dispense copies to 2009’s (surely economically terrified) graduates. How a college grad would interpret the gift of a book of life advice written by a man who proceeded to take his own life, well, one would need a writer with Wallace’s darkly comic gifts to pen such a scene. One’s sympathies go out to the editors: how to publish a speech of 137 sentences into a book? The unfortunate solution was to place just one sentence per page, giving the book the look and feel of an oracular text: Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet or Rumi’s love poetry. Those who embraced Wallace’s phenomenal talent may find themselves wishing the Kenyon speech had been left unbound, to be folded into a future edition of his nonfiction as a three- or four-page coda. Here, when a three-word sentence—“And so on,” page 87—is forced to balance an entire page on its shoulders, the reader starts to feel sorry not only for the sentence, but—if such indulgences may be permitted—for Wallace, posthumous. Asking a reader to applaud every sentence is a high-risk endeavor, and threatens to bury this gem of an essay under a drumbeat of meaningful pauses. Had Wallace imagined every sentence would receive a curtain call, one wonders if he would have insisted, at the very least, on some footnotes.

Peter Stevenson is executive editor of The Observer. He can be reached at pstevenson@observer.com.

Women , photographs by Annie Leibovitz, essay by Susan Sontag. Random House, 239 pages, $75.

At the beginning of the essay that introduces her friend Annie Leibovitz's new book of pictures, Women , Susan Sontag tells us that most of the women photographed are fully clothed, and therefore it is "not the other kind of all-women picture book …" That is a silly disclaimer since, in the past several years, coffee table books of photographs of fully clothed women-sisters, mothers and daughters-have been best sellers. By ignoring those books and opposing Ms. Leibovitz's photographs of women to male-generated pornography, Ms. Sontag is letting the reader-viewer know that these are serious pictures, developed in the political darkroom of late 20th-century America, and are meant to instruct as much as to delight. The essay does not mention that most pop culture consumers identify Ms. Leibovitz's photos with Vanity Fair , where they play a crucial role in creating and sustaining the pornography of affluence and fame. But if the pictures are Ms. Leibovitz's, the photographer credits Ms. Sontag for "the idea of the book." Can an Annie Leibovitz photograph, however compelling and even mesmerizing, support a big idea?

The idea of putting Ms. Sontag and Ms. Leibovitz between one set of covers is inspired, to say the least; the former's New York Review of Books crowd mingling with the latter's fans downtown at Lot 61. In fact, Ms. Sontag's essay is an attempt to wrest Ms. Leibovitz's photographs back from the magazine pages where they help sell movie stars and BMW's, and to push them in the direction of documentary. Move over, Sebastião Salgado! But Ms. Leibovitz is really an artist, not a journalist. Her photos create moments more than they capture them. They are stage directed and choreographed. When it works-like the picture of former Texas governor Ann Richards toting a shotgun, or a dour-looking Rosie O'Donnell in a Charlie Chaplin getup, or Jerry Hall suckling her naked baby boy-Ms. Leibovitz is helping us to see beneath the surface of things. At times, though, you feel like you've stumbled onto the set of an Annie Leibovitz Production. Nothing particularly wrong with that-after all, you never forget you're reading Nabokov when you're reading Nabokov-but the essay and the layout of the book make much larger claims for Ms. Leibovitz's oeuvre .

By interspersing sexy photographs of Heidi Fleiss and Nicole Kidman with closeup shots of victims of domestic violence at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, Ms. Leibovitz and Ms. Sontag have created a book that fairly hammers you over the head with its agenda. On one page, you get three Houston socialites with big hats and fake smiles; on the next, black coal miners in Alabama. Rather than letting you get drawn into the photographs, Women wants to make sure you get the point. If you want to look at Sigourney Weaver in a fishnet body stocking and shiny black ankle boots, well, you better not skip over the photograph of two grossly overweight women outside a gas station in rural Texas. The problem is, the book's point-that women come in all shapes and sizes; that women are still oppressed; that women grow old; that women are deans of law schools and farmers and astronauts and scientists-feels a bit tired by now. Surely we know these things.

Ms. Sontag would perhaps respond that we do know them, but that we don't know them enough. If we did, women would earn equal pay to men and would not be subject to reflexive hostility when they show ambition and independence. Fair enough. But the essay ignores the photos that accompany it. Read Ms. Sontag's critique of "today's hugely complex fashion-and-photography system" and you wonder if she bothered to turn to the book's last page, where Ms. Leibovitz ends her acknowledgments with, "I am extremely grateful to Anna Wintour and Vogue ." If only Ms. Sontag had written an essay that tackled head-on Ms. Leibovitz's financial and artistic symbiosis with "today's hugely complex fashion-and-photography system." What would she make of the photograph, taken from below, of the red panties and crotches of four faceless, high-kicking Kilgore College Rangerette cheerleaders? Is it commentary-the male sports establishment exploits women by making them dress up as cheerleaders-or is it appreciation? How does the photograph jibe with Ms. Sontag's statement that this is a book about women's "ambition," which women have been "schooled to stifle in themselves"? Is a photograph of women's underwear a celebration of ambition?

Ms. Sontag may not be particularly interested in what male viewers think of Ms. Leibovitz's pictures. Her essay dismisses men as bores. She writes, "A book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women-there is no equivalent 'question of men.' Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress."

Of course it is always interesting to read Ms. Sontag on any subject. Dispatches from her pen come so rarely these days that one imagines tweedy, bookish types crouched in the corner of Barnes & Noble, furtively reading her essay and saving their 75 bucks. As much as this offering can read like a Hillary Clinton stump speech, it does have its moments. Ms. Sontag tells us that in Russia, women being photographed mouthed the French phrase " pe-tite-pomme " seconds before the camera's flash, whether or not they knew the words' meaning, because doing so left the mouth, eyes and cheeks in the most flattering position.

One of the most powerful images in Women is of Ms. Sontag herself. The black-and-white portrait closes the book; Ms. Sontag, her hair gone fully white and cut short, is shown in profile, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes looking away from the camera. Her mouth is in a small half-smile, but the effect is broody, as if she were hatching the big idea.

And looking at the photographs of the women in Women , the most striking thing about them is precisely their joyless quality. Yes, women can be astronauts and coal miners-but they can also laugh, smile, flirt, dance and be outrageous. Not here. It's as if the mirthful element of the female character has been carefully edited out. Women have come a long way, but under Ms. Leibovitz's gaze they don't have much fun

No dice. Tori's in your blood. With her Clairol Torrid Torch Crimson hair, this daughter of a North Carolina preacher, whose real name is Myra Ellen Amos, first entered your world when you saw a video of hers some years back, in which she danced with big live writhing snakes and let rats crawl over her, all the while keeping a coy smile on her wide, red lips. The sound was incidental.

You read some things about Tori. (Her fans always refer to her as just "Tori.") How she was a classically trained pianist who enrolled in the prestigious Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, when she was just 5. How she loved Led Zeppelin, later sang Gershwin in gay bars, how in 1988 she headed up a really bad Los Angeles hair metal band called Y Kant Tori Read. How in 1990 she moved to England and released her first album, Little Earthquakes , which sold over a million copies and how each of her next two albums– Under the Pink and Boys for Pele –did, too. How in her live shows she seemed to achieve carnal knowledge of her piano bench. How her songs dealt with her anger at Christianity, with her own date rape, with her sexuality. You read interviews and cringed at the dopey stuff she said, stuff like, "Socks and mittens are my friends" or "I think that people who can't believe in faeries aren't worth knowing."

Of course, you went right out and bought Tori's 1996 album, Boys for Pele , and it became the soundtrack for a rough patch, the tape on auto-reverse as you drove the mountains and cried your tears of self-pity. Then you put Tori away, returned to expensive box sets of blues and folk masters, returned to Bob Dylan and Ella Fitzgerald. Until two years later, May 1998, when her new album, From the Choirgirl Hotel, was released by Atlantic Records. You pounced on it like a cat.

You found much to like, even love, on the album. While sometimes Ms. Amos' lyrics, like those of Beck, appear to be nothing more than meaningless word salad–"The Lord of the Flies was diagnosed as sound"–she is able to be both deeply funny, as in "Playboy Mommy" ("Don't judge me so harsh little girl/ so you got a playboy mommy"), about a mom in platforms who was "a good friend of American soldiers"; and cleverly honest, as in "Northern Lad" ("Girls, you've got to know/ when it's time to turn the page/ when you're only wet/ because of the rain"). And then there's her tremendous piano playing; she is clearly describing herself when she sings, "I guess you go too far/ when pianos try to be guitars." Those who agree that the Rolling Stones were never so hot as when they had Ian Stewart accompanying them on piano will welcome Ms. Amos' one-woman keyboard bash, abundantly evident on the album's most raucous song, "She's Your Cocaine," about a toxic woman men destroy themselves over.

There are also a number of nice ballads, including "Jackie's Strength," in which the singer remembers a childhood marked by John F. Kennedy's assassination and "lunch boxes worshipping David Cassidy," and then faces her own wedding day with trepidation: "Never thought my day would come/ my bridesmaids getting laid I pray for Jackie's strength." Ms. Amos, who calls herself "the Sybil of songwriting," has told interviewers that each song on the new album represents a different female character, all of whom are staying in the fictional "Choirgirl Hotel." One thing many of the hotel guests have in common is an awareness of the cruel ironies of romance ("If you love enough you'll lie a lot") and a robust fondness for sticky female sexuality, as in "Raspberry Swirl," when Ms. Amos sings, "If you want inside her/ well,/ boy you better make her raspberry swirl."

But there's some bad news as well: Ms. Amos has discovered electronica and trip-hop. Whereas on Boys for Pele she played harpsichord when she wanted to get radical, the new record has some unfortunate forays into high-tech gimmickry. On some tracks, notably "Hotel" and "Cruel," Ms. Amos sounds disturbingly like Madonna. Ethereal Girl slumming with Material Girl. One trusts it's just a phase.

Is From the Choirgirl Hotel as good as Boys for Pele ? Probably. But how can you tell, when the circumstances of your listening are so different? Back in '96, you were vulnerable, a bit of a mess, you needed the sentimentality and masochism of Tori's kooky, grad student mysticism. Now you've emerged from all that. You'll put Choirgirl on the CD rack, maybe give it to your little sister, and head to Tower Records to check out that new Miles Davis reissue.

But that doesn't explain why you've just written down an Internet address where, it is promised, you can download pictures of Tori's recent wedding day.