On Women
by
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Readers' Rating Index
87/99
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About This Book
A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. "The most interesting ideas are heresies," she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines. On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of the challenges and humiliations women face as they age; the relationship between women's liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls "that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites"; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces―relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag's inimitable mind at work.
Reviews
"Though the selections date from the 1970s, the insights remain topical and serve as a window into a brilliant mind whose analysis continues to provoke."
"A potent Sontag capsule compounded of legendarily smart prose and clever editorial decisions."
"To read such a statement in isolation is infuriating enough, and not only because you grow increasingly weary of the conviction that the past must always be measured against our own, supposedly morally superior, times ..."
"Her sentences only begin to accumulate their sonorous, unsettling meanings when she's reading a photograph or applying the techniques of new historicism to a film, not when she's making vacuous statements about women and beauty ..."
"This is one of those moments when smart voices from other times can offer us clarity and fresh perspectives on our own."
"Whether Sontag's defiant uncategorizability strikes you as subtlety or evasiveness depends on your stomach for uncertainty."
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