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STYLES OF RADICAL WILL

Name: STYLES OF RADICAL WILL
Author: Susan Sontag
ISBN: 0312420218

by Susan Sontag ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 1969

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It is becoming difficult to sustain any fervent interest in Susan Sontag's career. Her critical ideas, embracing everyone from Hegel to Walter Benjamin, appear more and more merely polemical excursions in phenomenological or structuralist thought. Against Interpretation had its topical cachet: a bubbly belligerent advocacy of "camp," happenings, Levi-Strauss, the nouveau roman, Artaud. What it lacked in intelligibility, it made up for in le dernier cri. With Styles of Radical Will, the avant garde pantheon opens its doors to Cage, "the pornographic imagination," "the theory of art as assault on the audience," New Left politics. These essays, more carefully constructed than Miss Sontag's previous forays, are also much duller. How surprisingly banal, how tiresome Miss Sontag's militant language seems: "an erotics of agony," "exemplary," "excruciating," "ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing." Even the famous use of inverted commas cannot save Miss Sontag's daring cliches: "The Vietnamese are 'whole' human beings, not? 'split' as we are." Again and again Miss Sontag bemoans the loss of spontaneity, the deadening effects of analysis, all the while performing as the most abstract, benighted, "complex" savant. Of course, there are interesting or reflective passages: Miss Sontag is a serious and ambitious critic. Still, a private quarrel goes on between what she is and what she seeks, giving the aura of an embalmed intensity.

Pub Date: March 21, 1969

ISBN: 0312420218

Page Count: 292

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1969

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WOMEN
by Susan Sontag ; edited by David Rieff

- BOOK REVIEW
DEBRIEFING
by Susan Sontag ; edited by Benjamin Taylor

- BOOK REVIEW
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS
by Susan Sontag

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.