About this title: Susan Sontag looks at the depiction of the cruelties of modern life on the evening news, along with the media's role in shaping the viewer's perception of events. As, thanks to television, atrocity becomes commonplace, does the viewer become anesthetized to it? Does it lead to greater violence? How exactly are people affected by their inability to do anything about what they see? And how does this knowledge affect the way they conduct their daily lives? As Sontag asks these questions, she brings up some of the issues she tacked in her classic work ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1977), exploring them anew ...
read more
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 2002-02-19
ISBN-13:9780374248581ISBN:0374248583
Description: Fair. Clean Ex-Library copy. Usual stamps and stickers; dust jacket in mylar cover taped to boards. Text is unmarked and spine is sound. read more
"An excellent book about pain, war, and it's images. Very relative to our society's current affairs with Iraq and Afghanistan. "For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied." Susan Sontag"
"Very depressing to read. I didn't mind what Sontag had to say and I found that she brought up some decent points but I found many times while reading this book I drifted off thus making me forget what she was talking about. In the end I found she repeated herself far too much throughout the book for my liking."
"I had to read this book for my English 102 class this quarter. It is a very good book. It raises a lot of questions and really made me think. We're still discussing the book in class and I definitely have more questions than answers right now. For example, why is it ok to publish and view photos of the dead from other countries, but not our own? What's the difference?"
"Sontag's book examines how we receive photographic and artistic representations of human suffering. In the end, while she seems cautiously optimistic that photographs can have some positive impact on our perspective of suffering, they still don't hold a candle to actually being there and experiencing the suffering first-hand.
Most interesting to me was the theme of photographic interpretation running through the book, as she acknowledges the reality that we often see photographs as a factual record of some incident while failing to recognize the situatedness of the photographer. This reality saps some of the "real" out of photographs, for they are often staged and they are always framed, therefore only ever showing us a small sliver of the larger tragedy.
I also appreciated the world-weary tone of the essay, a perspective Sontag has earned through her experience as a first-hand observer in Sarajevo during the Serb-Bosnian conflict. She rightly argues that no one over a certain age should get to walk around blindly innocent to human depravity. It's too prominent, and too well-displayed by pretty much every media outlet, for us to walk in some kind of naivete about the human condition. For all the conflictedness I feel about our being desensitized to violence through the media, this is certainly one benefit: an honesty about who we really are as a race. Whatever photographs and art portraying suffering and death do or do not tell us about a particular conflict or tragedy, they do witness powerfully to the universality of human depravity."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
