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Title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick ISBN: 0-679-64026-6 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 06 June, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.39 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Goodbye to All That"
Comment: "Goodbye to All That," the closer in this collection of essays, is a commanding and haunting piece of prose. When she was 20, Didion moved from Sacramento to Manhattan, and this piece captures her initial enchantment with her new life and new city and, eventually, her growing disillusionment. But this is not just another coming of age tale, for the prose--in its sparseness, clarity, cadence, its sense of *purpose*--is first rate. Didion recalls in these pages a tumultuous time in her life, and although she comes across as a shy girl of fragile mind and weak constitution, her words are fearless. Worth the price of the book alone.
Rating: 4
Summary: American Anomie
Comment: This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties. Many pieces in the first and third sections of the book ("Lifestyles in the Golden Land" and "Seven Places of the Mind") seem rather dated; the piece which made the most impression on this reviewer was the least ambitious of the group; to me, the portrait of Comrade Laski of the CPUSA-ML is a tiny masterpiece of irony. The pieces from the second section ("Personals")were much more enjoyable, especially "On Keeping a Notebook" and "On Self-Respect." Overall, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is more memorable for the author's endearing prose style than for the individual essays.
Rating: 5
Summary: America's finest essayist, at her finest
Comment: I have owned several copies of this book, and have given away more copies than I can count. It's a book I come back to, at least once a year since 1980, when I first read it. It seems to me to be better and better each time. The times it's about may be long gone, but the issues at the heart of these essays haven't changed much at all.
Much has been made of Didion's take on California, and this book is laden with essays about the place, and the people, and a particular time that - as other reviewers here have noted - has a different resonance in popular culture than the one she presents here. Didion herself recently professed some alarm at the idea that she is an expert on the place (in 'Where I Was From'), but there's no doubt that she's provided more food for thought about contemporary culture than almost anyone else.
But the real strength of her writing is in her prose style, in which not a single sentence is sloppy, or ill-considered. Her style is distinctive, but it's not just for show. There are other fine essayists working today, but few are as disciplined and considered as Didion in the way they write.
It's probably a toss-up as to whether this book or 'The White Album' is a better place to start with Didion's work. I think 'The White Album' is a more cohesive collection, but there are better individual essays in 'Slouching', including the sublime essays in the 'Personals' section. And chances are that once you've read one, you'll read the other, and in that case it makes sense to start with the earlier collection, which is this one.
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Title: The White Album by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374522219 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Where I Was From by JOAN DIDION ISBN: 0679433325 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Play It As It Lays : A Novel by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374521719 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 by Joan Didion, Frank Rich ISBN: 1590170733 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Political Fictions by Joan Didion ISBN: 0375718907 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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