Praise for Susan Sontag
"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, as smart
as she’s supposed to be, and a better writer, sentence for
sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag
'intellectual.' " --New York Observer
"We wouldn’t recognize our postwar
intellectual history without Susan Sontag." --Talk magazine
"Not only did [her work] serve what should be
an essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to
new work, weird work, things they wouldn’t ordinarily
encounter . . . it did so in a notably un-weird manner. Thoroughly
trained in literature and philosophy, Sontag applied the standards
of the past -- truth, beauty, transcendence, spirituality -- to the
new art of the sixties, with its alienation, extremity, perversity.
. . . And the writing was marvelous -- high-toned, Brahmin, but full of
zest and the pleasure of performing." --The New
Yorker
"[Sontag] has one foot in the camp of pure
mind, and another in the camp of hedonism and popular
culture . . . Anchoring all her enthusiasms and gaieties and
eccentricities is a very strong moral sense, which is expressed in
that most admirable and rare quality -- physical and intellectual
courage. She’s brave." --Vanity Fair
"[Sontag is] one of our very few brand-name
intellectuals. . . . the bearer of the standard of high seriousness in a
culture that has essentially capitulated to the easy lifting of the
ironic mode or the ready clasp of pure entertainment." --The Yale Review
Reviews of
Where the Stress Falls
 "Where
the Stress Falls raises
the bar of criticism to the highest level . . . Sontag’s idea of a
writer is ‘someone interested in everything,’ someone who
‘travels everywhere.’ Her energy infuses every word in the
collection." --The Seattle Times
"With
its captivating range of subjects, Where the Stress Falls
is an unrivaled guide to what to read." --The Austin Chronicle
"On each of
these essays, one could write an essay . . . the cumulative effect
of her writing is to stimulate the flow of argument . . . you might
say that she has diverted the mainstream; her private islands of
thought now look like the territory on which we've always lived. Her
very success has moved her from the margin to the center. . .
.
What ultimately matters about Sontag . . . is what she has
defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and
writing as 'a way of being fully human.' . . . She persuades
us . . . that suffering must be analyzed, not indulged, and that the
most personal of misfortunes can be put to work in making sense of
the human condition. She
stands for what is articulate, independent, exploratory: for self as
a work in progress." --Los Angeles Times Book
Review
Reviews of
In America
 "What is wonderful about the book is .
. . [the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and
knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In
America, its cat's cradle of meanings." --The New Yorker
"Vividly inquisitive . . . An
exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail,
the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."
--The Economist
"Often brave and beautiful,
occasionally arch and irritating, Susan Sontag's fourth novel is an
epic riff of imagination on little-known historical events . . . .
The scope of the tale is vast, and there is largesse in the telling,
the sheer happiness of art." --The Washington Post Book World
"A tour de force . . . a magical
accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and
truth." --The Baltimore Sun
"Almost but not quite as lively as in
The Volcano Lover, Sontag's prose here is lithe, playful." --The New York Times Book Review
"In America displays Sontag in a
relaxed, pleasure-seeking mode, guiding her characters through a long
travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in
the brave new world." --Time
Magazine
"Inspired . . . In America [is]
a counter-romance, alternately hilarious and tragic."
--Vanity Fair
"[In America] has an
invigorating spaciousness . . . packed with characters, incidents,
and color, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence."
--New York Magazine
"Enough incident, psychology, local
color and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels,
a couple of 'Ragtimes' and a brace of theatrical memoirs."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
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