Another side of a significant 20th-century writer, preserved from the archives.
A humanizing interview with the late cultural icon, who was often perceived as a fiercely aggressive and polarizing intellect.
In 1978, Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott (Days that I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 2012, etc.) conducted this interview with the woman he had known as a professor when he was a student, and RS published it the following year. It is reminiscent of a time when popular magazines would commit what now seems an unthinkable number of pages to the profile of a serious author. Though it ran long in the magazine, it runs much longer here, offering a conversational warmth that some might find more inviting than Sontag’s published work. Though she says, “I’m not really a polemicist,” she maintains that the writer’s mission is “to be in an aggressive and adversarial relationship to falsehoods of all kinds.” What she perceived as falsehoods were often controversial, but her interviewer never offers a hint of challenge. Cott is more like an acolyte, occasionally fawning, asking questions that reflect his own erudition. This interview ran a quarter-century before Sontag’s death, but it captured her at the peak of her cultural prominence, discussing Illness as Metaphor and On Photography, showing how slack metaphors and reductive interpretation misrepresent the essence of reality. Most illuminating is the personal detail—e.g., how she started reading seriously at 3 and “was writing up a storm by the time I was eight or nine years old.” What made her perfect for that magazine at that time was her pivotal role in the bridging of high and popular culture: “When I go to a Patti Smith concert at CBGB, I enjoy, participate, appreciate and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche.” Or, as she had previously written, “If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?”
Another side of a significant 20th-century writer, preserved from the archives.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-18979-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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