Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Hardcover)

~ (Author), (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The first of three planned volumes of Sontag's private journals, this book is extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontags writing—extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance toward mediocrity; Sontags vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise the late critic and novelists fans and detractors. At 15, when these journals began, Sontag (1933–2004) already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is most remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century's leading minds. In these carefully selected excerpts (many passages are only a few lines), Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student at Berkeley discovering her sexuality (bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of 18, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love (physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me) and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of 30. Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic. (Dec.)
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From Booklist

Rieff sensitively portrayed revered critic and novelist Sontag during her last days in Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008) and now continues to navigate the great sea of her legacy as editor of her journals. He didn’t want to open his mother’s private life to public eyes, but because her papers are available to scholars, he does so preemptively, granting readers access to the innermost thoughts of a genuine prodigy. In 1948, at age 15, Sontag asks, “And what is it to be young in years and suddenly awakened to the anguish, the urgency of life?” After starting college at 16, she fills her journals with passionate analysis of books, her intellectual ambitions, her struggle to accept her homosexuality, and the ecstasy and torment of her first lesbian relationship. Then, suddenly, this ardent seeker becomes a wife and mother. She loves her son, but marriage does not suit her, and her battle to reclaim her true self is one of several dramatic rebirths punctuating this electrifying record of Sontag striving to become Sontag. Two more volumes are planned. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (December 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374100748
• ISBN-13: 978-0374100742
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #294,852 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating , December 28, 2008

By	Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews

Aside from David Rieff's overly meddlesome editing, this collection of journals is a penetrating, deeply personal portrait of the late Susan Sontag. Perhaps what is most astonishing in this scattering of notes, commentaries, and lists, is Sontag's astonishing precociousness. Her entries at the age of 16 bear the mark of a burgeoning intellectual of the first order. We are granted access (perhaps for the first time)to Sontag's personal life, and given her reclusive nature I couldn't help feeling that I was reading something that should not have been published. Still, what is most interesting here is Sontag, the young collector of ideas and works of art, living life the only way she knew how-with intellectual and moral "seriousness" and undying passion. A fantastically entertaining read.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remembering Sontag, January 2, 2009

By	Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Sontag, Susan. "Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1946-1963", edited by David Rieff, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.

Remembering Sontag

Amos Lassen

Susan Sontag became an icon of modern culture. Her books and ideas characterize a generation and her death is a loss to us all. "Reborn" is the first of three planned volumes of Sontag's private journals and we anticipate learning a great deal from her writing. Sontag did not tolerate mediocrity; she was a serious writer and an authority on modern culture. There are surprises in these journals as we see that beneath the hard façade, Sontag was extremely vulnerable and very, very human.
The journals begin when Sontag was 15 and that early do we see signs of the woman she was to become. She was already hungry to learn and from that hunger developed one of the leading minds of the modern era. We read about the things she loved--reading and movie going and we read about her college days at Berkeley, her awakening sexuality and her marriage to Phillip Rieff and her only child, David, who edited this volume.
We read how that marriage fell apart and her relationships with women--the relationships that caused Sontag to re-evaluate her ideas of sex. (Sontag was not, as some maintain, a lesbian. She considered herself as bisexual). We also learn how important physical beauty was to her.
Sontag, even in her early years, was a staunch defender of the mind and the "necessity for reading and writing `as a way of being fully human'". She anticipated pleasure everywhere and she found it. When she became involved in something, she became completely and utterly involved. The book is a self-portrait of Sontag which lets us into her appetite for life and a complex self-awareness. The book is personal and penetrates Sontag's early life and we see her as an intellectual in progress as early as age 16. She collected art but she also collected ideas and she lived her life with a seriousness that became her passion. She wrote about so much because she had so much to say and we all benefit from the fact that she shared her life with us.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars son of an author, June 3, 2009

By	M. Funsch "m. e." (in america) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

the editing is maddening. i have no tolerance for it. i love the journals and the notebooks, their halting unrestrainedness (as if she planned for them to be read), their candor, their (at times) bombast and naivete, but i become so frustrated with the editor's interference that at times, i have to put the book down.