Customer Reviews

Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon

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This is a book equal to its subject. Few intellectuals are as interesting as Susan Sontag, and the authors are fair and balanced in their presentation of the facts and controversies that make up the life of Sontag. The authors point to many facts that can only engender admiration of Sontag. For example, her fierce independence-- forsaking the safety of academic appointments to enhance her freedom to write on her own terms. Sontag's refusal to be labelled a "woman writer" or "lesbian writer" is a rejection of the simplistic logic of the "identity" crowd now so dominant in the academy. There is much to criticise in the life of Sontag (e.g., her fatuous embrace of the North Vietnamese) but far more to admire and emulate. Both authors and subject are better off for this book.

This is a bad book. The two authors, who between them have about 1/100th of Sontag's intelligence, integrity, and imagination, written in the most pedestrian prose possible, set about to undo her reputation.

Each time they credit her with something, within the next sentence or two they somehow take it back, or cast doubt on it. Only her battles with cancer are described with anything like sympathy.

Apparently it is beyond them that a woman, and a beautiful woman at that, could produce some of the most important essays of our time. That she has changed her position on some issues is treated as some sort of betrayal, hypocracy, or attempts to jump on a particular bandwagon. Perhaps, like the intelligent woman she is, she re-thought some of her earlier positions.

Why they wrote this book is beyond me.

Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock have done an admirable job. It's hard to imagine a more delicious account of how a bright, imaginative girl from North Hollywood High manufactured and marketed herself as an international literary icon. To get at the truth, the authors have stripped off the gilt and the result is a startling portrait that is sure to generate controversy. This is a biography that is hard to put down.

I enjoyed this book, and found that it was well written. Having just finished it, let me advise the potential reader that this book is slanted, and, for sure, Susan Sontag was not an individual to get warm and fuzzy with. Reading about her and her partner in her later life, Annie Leibowitz, I realized one thing: these two must have been the most insufferable lesbian couple ever. Both were so convinced of their own superiority, and both demanded that the world cow-tow to them for their specialness. Also, Sontag's son, who went on to edit his mother's work, also had the same sense of entitlement. For example, it is revealed that Susan's publisher, Robert Giroux, and her son would hound reviewers who were critical of her work. She seemed to believe she shouldn't have to suffer the same slings and arrows any other author would be subject to.

What I found most fascinating, and truly the strongest part of this book, were the stories revolving around various people in Susan Sontag's life. A much loved phrase of hers was "acquirement and disburdenment," which describes her pattern of dealing with people over the years. Four friends/fellow artists are revealed in some depth: fellow writers, Arthur Chesler and Camille Paglia, photographer, Peter Huyar, and box collage artist, Joseph Cornell. These were the most interesting people in the book, and these same people Ms. Sontag "acquired and disburdened." I was left wanting to know more about them, and this presents a problem when the peripheral characters prove more interesting than the subject of this book.

- Siouxie, The Bronx

This is a book equal to its subject. Few intellectuals are as interesting as Susan Sontag, and the authors are fair and balanced in their presentation of the facts and controversies that make up the life of Sontag. The authors point to many facts that can only engender admiration of Sontag. For example, her fierce independence-- forsaking the safety of academic appointments to enhance her freedom to write on her own terms. Sontag's refusal to be labelled a "woman writer" or "lesbian writer" is a rejection of the simplistic logic of the "identity" crowd now so dominant in the academy. There is much to criticise in the life of Sontag (e.g., her fatuous enbrace of Hanoi) but far more to admire and emulate. Both authors and subject are better off for this book.

Always an admirer of Ms. Sontag's work, but admitting all the time I probably didn't know half of what she talked about, this book made me realize I bought into the Role, the Persona of Sontag. My admiration of her was a guilty pleasure, an enjoyment of the image. What she did do however was make me pursue the writers, the works of art she mentioned and gave those people and objects a validity that insured me of their importance even if I didn't understand what that importance was. I cannot image how these two writers managed to write this book. Their research material must be overwhelming. It is a rivieting mesmerizing account I am greatly enjoying. One major omission: no mention of her siblings. What happened there?

degree of certainty unless we've done research ourselves or unless we have several top rated biographies to compare with.

There are no great biographies of Susan Sontag and few of us know her life well, from our personal experience! I believe this book is the best we have.

I'm sorry to say that I have never cared for Susan Sontag's literary work or for her literary criticism and my belief is that neither will survive her death. We shouldn't be surprised at this: Historically, the reputation of writers who have been famous in their own time has very often died along with them.

Hundreds of famous writers from the past, such as Monk Lewis, Anne Radcliffe and Edgar Wallace were as well known as Stephen King, Tom Clancy and J.K. Rawlings today but are unknown to all but a few specialists now, while many, many great writers such as Stendhal, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson died in obscurity but are among the greatest writers we have.

Even if this biography paints Susan Sontag in a less favorable light than is justified, I think it remains an object lesson for what writers and other creative people should NOT do, which is to try to become rich and famous bringing wisdom and intelligence to the human race: Almost all the world's great religions and philosophies tell us that truth tellers are more often reviled in their own time than revered and that the crowd more often hoists onto its shoulders those who flatter it than those who tell it the truth. We know what happens to most of the truth tellers.

The flash is the brilliant Sontag herself--her quicksilver mind, her style; and the trash is this book and the modus operandi of these authors.