Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cott (Days That I Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono), a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone, presents the full text of an interview he conducted in 1978 with Sontag, which was excerpted in the magazine in 1979. Conducted over several months, in Paris and New York, the interview provides a compact, complex, and critical portrait of the author of Against Interpretation and On Photography, who died in 2004. Through his insightful questions, as well as in his preface and recollections, Cott shows Sontag as a force of cultural consciousness. The interview takes readers through her views on a range of subjects, including physicality and illness, rock and roll, feminism, love and relationships, sexuality, spirituality, geography, and the writer's life. Though at times, Sontag's tendency to speak "not in sentences but in measured and expansive paragraphs" makes it difficult to follow the discussion, the book will be a great resource for longtime followers of the critic and novelist, as well as for those encountering this great mind for the first time. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1978, on two separate occasions (June/November) and in two very different locales (Paris/New York), Cott (Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein) interviewed National Book Award-winning American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag (1933-2004) for Rolling Stone magazine. These interviews comprise 12 hours of discussion, but only a third of these conversations originally appeared in the October 4, 1979, issue. This book includes the entire interview transcript. Cott knew Sontag since his college years in the early 1960s. In the preface to this work, he provides an exciting overview of Sontag's life, her major works, and the numerous interactions he had with her before and after these interviews took place. Cott describes Sontag's interview style as measured and expansive paragraphs, which the text of these interviews confirms. The discussion falls to a variety of topics including Sontag's battle with breast cancer, her writings, East Coast vs. West Coast mentalities, rock and roll's influence, sexuality, Nietzsche, French feminists, and the joy of reading. This riveting work would have been made even more interesting if Cott had included the reaction of Rolling Stone readers to the original material. Verdict This fascinating interview will appeal to anyone interested in Sontag, literature, and American culture and society.-Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
