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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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