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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face.
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money - and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated - and undermined - her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo - Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait - a great American novel in the form of a biography.
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Foursome
- Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
- By: Carolyn Burke
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin
- Length: 16 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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New York, 1921: Acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz celebrates the success of his latest exhibition - the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of his soon-to-be wife, the young Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibit acts as a turning point for the painter poised to make her entrance into the art scene. There, she meets Rebecca Salsbury, the fiancé of Stieglitz’s protégé, Paul Strand, marking the start of a bond between the couples that will last more than a decade and reverberate throughout their lives.
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A competent account of four interesting lives
- By Sil A. on 11-21-20
By: Carolyn Burke
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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On Freedom
- Four Songs of Care and Constraint
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
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So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
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Just great
- By Kristi Strong on 12-14-21
By: Maggie Nelson
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The New Negro
- The Life of Alain Locke
- By: Jeffrey C. Stewart
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 45 hrs and 34 mins
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In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.
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Let me guess? Locke was a gay black man?
- By Porter on 01-21-20
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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To Show and to Tell
- The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
- By: Phillip Lopate
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.
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Not a guide on writing personal essays
- By A. Yoshida on 08-07-13
By: Phillip Lopate
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What listeners say about Sontag
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-26-19
I wanted another 22 hours
I adored this book. Philosophy! Queerness! Gossip! Art! Love! Loss! Sickness! Death! War! I sobbed when it was over. I wanted more. Benjamin Moser has summoned controversy over the way he took liberties crafting Sontag's inner world, but the reader can sort through what is slippery and what is solid easily enough. I deeply appreciate his portrait of how this writer came to be a flawed but brilliant human AND a flawed but brilliant artist.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Sil A.
- 10-08-20
Revealing Bio on a Superlative Life
Sunsan Sontag’s essays have been a strong influence on the way I view our culture and my medium, photography. It was enriching, though brutal, to learn more about her life. Author Benjamin Moser speaks candidly and with great insight about the life of a remarkable intellectual of our generation, a unique voice. A great listen to anyone interested in contemporary culture.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Book Reader
- 03-03-23
I love Susan Sontag’s writing!
Susan Sontag’s life was as she said - passionate unto the end. To write as a bullfighter can risk his life standing before the bull. It is a ritual, sacrifice and the torero placed the sword accurately the bull never move and simply drop were he stands. It’s courage, it’s precision, a perfect skill with no suffering. Sontag wrote with this kind of passion.
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- Eddie
- 05-24-20
Narrator
Couldn’t get through the book as I couldn’t listen to the narrator for another second.
Really disappointed. I think the book is probably very good!
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7 people found this helpful
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- Darla J Comeaux
- 09-09-22
Remarkable undertaking
Fabulous following of Sontag’s life and culture. Informative in a broad spectrum of insights. Introduction and afterwords are masterful. Darla Comeaux 9/9/22
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- D. KENT
- 06-12-20
Gossipy, best for Sontag fans, Narrator: Arghhh
I'm not sure why I decided to listen to this book in the first place since I've never read anything by Sontag. I had heard of her so perhaps I bought the book to learn more about this sort-of famous intellectual. Anyone who has read and understands her work, and has familiarity with Sontag's influences, may find it interesting. Not sure about anyone else. I'm sorry to hear that Sontag had poor hygiene. I wish I didn't know that.
As for the narrator, I was relieved to find that other reviewers found her as annoying as I did although it wasn't bad enough to induce me to quit listening, which I've done with other books. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this woman's voice... it's kind of gulping and quivering, particularly when she nears the end of a sentence, injecting a bit more drama than necessary and it gets annoying at times. Another reviewer said it sounds like she's having an orgasm. I wouldn't go that far.
The worst aspect of the narration is the French pronunciation, which is almost inappropriately authentic, almost as if she's showing off, as if she wished she could read the entire book in French. Her reading of French phrases, titles, names and geographic locations was performed with a level of relish so irritating I considering hurling my phone across the room. I was so annoyed, in fact, that I called my ex just to complain about this narrator's habit of over-enunciating French. He admitted that he also finds that trait grating, so much so that he refused to let me play sections of the book, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to commiserate with him. But I digress. I still have a bit more to listen to; I think we're past the French section but part of me is bracing for the next mention of Sartre. I literally could scream.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Dr Philip N Best
- 05-13-23
Never dull and frequently hilarious
Infuriating and grandiose SS. Enjoyed the narrator’s enthusiastic reading. How much was Leibovitz earning to fund the madness of the later years?
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- Suzanne
- 11-02-19
Cloying voice
A long book. Too long. I stuck with this performance to the end, but I found myself annoyed and put on edge in each of the almost 30 hours by the cloying intensity of the narrator. It is no small feat to pronounce all the foreign words and proper nouns in a book such as this. High marks there. But there was an insinuating, know-it-all and too-pointed tone that robbed much of the book of its staying power and stole away its cosmopolitan nuance. The experience was like biography on coke. For books this long, please select performers with a more mellow approach..
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- LORETTA LIBBY ATKINS
- 10-21-19
Great psychological biography
Wonderful way to view history from the 60’s forward. Sontag is compelling, marvelous, awful and courageous. A psychological biography of the first order. The relationships and people she made & loved - amazing and so many willing to share their experiences with her. Pleased that Moser won’t let her molder in the closet. What a gal she was.
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- gesa ricken
- 06-01-21
Wrong narrator for this book
After repeated attempts to ignore the narrator's exaggerated exuberance, I had to give up and will actually read the book in a different format.
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