Schreiber’s intelligent reading of Sontag’s works and his fair and balanced handling of the impassioned controversies she...
A sensitive, cleareyed biography of an intellectual star, first published in Germany in 2007.
Despite lack of access to Sontag’s letters and diaries, being edited by her son at the time, Berlin-based writer Schreiber has made excellent use of extensive interviews with Sontag’s friends and lovers, as well as her published interviews, to create a perceptive and revealing portrait of his restless, glamorous and egotistical subject. Intellectually precocious, Sontag (1933-2004) began college at 16; the following year, after a 10-day courtship, she married her sociology instructor, Philip Rieff. When Rieff took a position at Brandeis University, they moved to the Boston area, where, when she was 19, their son was born. At 24, she was ready to write a doctoral dissertation at Harvard when theologian Paul Tillich recommended her for a fellowship at Oxford. Leaving her husband and son, Sontag traveled abroad for the first time, discovered Paris and launched her startling career. Central to Sontag’s success was her relationship with Roger Straus, her publisher, mentor and unfailing champion. At Straus’ legendary parties, she met such prominent figures as Edmund Wilson, Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, George Balanchine and Richard Avedon. They introduced her to others, and soon she was a “dramatically beautiful presence” among the New York literati. Her breakthrough to intellectual stardom was an iconoclastic essay, “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” (1964), which skewered “the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.” Schreiber follows Sontag’s wide-ranging career after this auspicious start, which included fiction, several volumes of essays and monographs, films and plays. Most notable are Illness as Metaphor (1978), the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966) and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980); On Photography (1977), Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) and the novel In America (2000).
Schreiber’s intelligent reading of Sontag’s works and his fair and balanced handling of the impassioned controversies she generated admirably serve both his subject and his readers.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2583-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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