From Booklist
Poague has collected more than 20 interviews with Sontag, beginning with a 1969 conversation with Edwin Newman and moving on up through the decades. This chronological structure charts the progression of Sontag's books, the evolution of her viewpoints, and her rise in stature from a brash young critic mocking radical chic to a cancer survivor pondering the cultural dimensions of disease in Illness as Metaphor (1978). Sontag, preferring philosophy to biography, asked that genuine interviews rather than mere profiles be selected for this collection, but what is most exciting about these vibrant and intellectual dialogues is Sontag's curiosity and vitality and the glimpses we get into her life. Sontag's erudition and brilliance may be intimidating, but her passion for thought and language is invigorating and inspiring. And it's a pleasure to hear her speak about her education; admit, in an animated Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott in 1978, that rock and roll liberated her from a sterile academic life; and describe her love of film and theater and ongoing involvement with great works of literature. Donna Seaman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The greatest effort is to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself, in your life, giving full attention to the world. That's what a writer does. I'm against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head. You don't.

The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known." Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interestig ideas, after all, are heresies.

I find it impossible to keep moral feelings out of my desire for pleasure. That is, part of my experience of pleasure is that there are facile pleasures, as there are facile ideas.