
Sontag
Her Life and Work
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Narrated by:
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Tavia Gilbert
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By:
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Benjamin Moser
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face.
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money - and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated - and undermined - her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo - Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait - a great American novel in the form of a biography.
©2019 Benjamin Moser (P)2019 HarperAudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Revealing Bio on a Superlative Life
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I love Susan Sontag’s writing!
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I wanted another 22 hours
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Really disappointed. I think the book is probably very good!
Narrator
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Remarkable undertaking
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As for the narrator, I was relieved to find that other reviewers found her as annoying as I did although it wasn't bad enough to induce me to quit listening, which I've done with other books. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this woman's voice... it's kind of gulping and quivering, particularly when she nears the end of a sentence, injecting a bit more drama than necessary and it gets annoying at times. Another reviewer said it sounds like she's having an orgasm. I wouldn't go that far.
The worst aspect of the narration is the French pronunciation, which is almost inappropriately authentic, almost as if she's showing off, as if she wished she could read the entire book in French. Her reading of French phrases, titles, names and geographic locations was performed with a level of relish so irritating I considering hurling my phone across the room. I was so annoyed, in fact, that I called my ex just to complain about this narrator's habit of over-enunciating French. He admitted that he also finds that trait grating, so much so that he refused to let me play sections of the book, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to commiserate with him. But I digress. I still have a bit more to listen to; I think we're past the French section but part of me is bracing for the next mention of Sartre. I literally could scream.
Gossipy, best for Sontag fans, Narrator: Arghhh
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Never dull and frequently hilarious
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Cloying voice
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Great psychological biography
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Clear portrait of her life.
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