slouching political ourselves collected

books:

30 reviews
Joan Didion

Farrar Straus & Giroux (T), 1968

Yeats, The Grateful Dead, and All That
This book starts out citing W.B. Yeats and Peggy Lee, co-equals in esteem and regard. Yeats and his slouching towards Bethlehem, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...And What rough best, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" and this lovely gem from Miss Peggy, "I learned ...

The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

2 reviews
Joan Didion

Vintage, 2007

About the moments that can change lives
The Year of Magical Thinking possesses hauntingly concise prose. It is a one-woman show that reads like having a conversation with Didion. The telling is intimate enough to make it feel as if it is an older and wiser sister telling you what you may likely confront in your lifetime. It is detailed enough to make tangible for theatergoers in New York City and Los Angeles face what one wishes was ...

The Year of Magical Thinking

494 reviews
Joan Didion

Alfred A Knopf, 2005

"Let it go."
In "The Year of Magical Thinking," Joan Didion chronicles the death of her husband, author and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. One evening, Dunne died of a severe heart attack while the couple ate dinner. The day had seemed like any other, aside from the fact that they had just returned from a hospital visit with their grown daughter, Quintana, who was in a coma from an unidentified illness. ...

Democracy

6 reviews
Joan Didion

Vintage, 1995

Exceptional
Didion has a unique, powerful style. It reminds me of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 in its irony and suppressed rage, but Didion's prose is just so elegant. "Democracy" is both a romantic and a political novel, with both themes beautifully intertwined. This is an exceptional work. Didion's heroine reminds one of several of her other heroines, coming from a background where she is expected to be an ...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
JOAN DIDION

Delta Books, 1968

Author of "Play it as it Lays"

Play It As It Lays

28 reviews
Joan didion

Pocket, 1980

In the Thick of Nothingness [T]
I have now read two books by Didion - this and the Pulitzer Prize winning "The World of Magical Thinking." Each is devilishly depressing. The similarities do not end there. The main character of this book, Maria Wyeth, physically resembles the author. Her roots are similar. And, she is an actress in the Hollywood that the author wrote and wrote more for. But, there are differences too. ...

The White Album

14 reviews
Joan Didion

Simon & Schuster, 1979

An astonishing collection
The praise gets heaped on Slouching Towards Bethlehem (as well it should), but after finishing The White Album, there is no doubt in my mind they are equals in every way - an eloquent, painstaking, timeless collection of one unexpected, evocative observation after another. The appeal of Didion's writing is often to glimpse the author underneath her thick and specific veils of details, to marvel ...

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)

10 reviews
Joan Didion

Everyman's Library, 2006

Beautiful Collection
What I had read from Didion in my college comp. class could not have prepared me for the depth and beauty of her body of work. In retrospect, I cannot believe that my professor only asked us to read ONE essay from this remarkable woman. Her work is amazing! Now I see what thousands of others have always known--that Didion is undoubtedly one of the best essayists and authors alive today. I ...

A Book of Common Prayer

10 reviews
Joan Didion

Simon & Schuster, 1977

The Revolution
In this uncommonly excellent prose, Ms. Didion describes an incredible scenario of a revolution in a Caribbean country. The country is dirt poor. There is no good water, there are no proper sewers and there are few good roads, except the one highway that leads to the house of El Presidente. The people live in squalor and there are only a few people in this island of the damned who are in ...

Where I Was From

18 reviews
Joan Didion

Vintage, 2004

Great-Great-Great-Great-Great
This book of essays by Joan Didion, entitled "Where I Was From," gained my attention from the start, and later also gained my respect. Loved all the detail, the overlapping, the apparent extensive amount of research--the compulsive force of it all. Much like one of her ancester, the one who stitched (and over-stitched) the quilt amidst all the turmoil while crossing the Sierra Nevada. Didion ...

Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11

5 reviews
Joan Didion

New York Review Books, 2003

Oh see what we cannot say
What has happened to freedom of speech in America? Why are we not publicly and openly debating the self-serving and undeomocratic policies of the Bush administration? Didion, in another fine essay on American life, asks these questions and tries to answer them. This is a fine book for anyone who worries about our nation proceeding out of control in its war for oil and corporate interests. ...

The Last Thing He Wanted

10 reviews
Joan Didion

Vintage, 1997

What to Make of It, I Don't Know
I have read several of Didion's non-fiction essay collections and this was the second of the writer's novels for me, after "Play It As It Lays." Reading "The Last Thing" made me feel stupid, and thus I was relieved to see that it averaged only three stars and that I was not the only one who found the prose somewhat irritating and the non-linear narrative quite confusing (for me, this was ...

Miami

8 reviews
Joan Didion

Simon & Schuster Books, 1987

A Story Perhaps Only a Novelist Can Tell Well
The story of the Cuban exiles in Miami deserves to be told with drama and passion because that is what it has been. In this page-turner, Joan Didion captures the rejection and racism that the Cuban exiles first encountered in Miami when they emigrated from Cuba after Castro assumed power. She shows how some of the Cubans became successful businesspersons, political powerbrokers, shapers of ...

Salvador

11 reviews
Joan Didion

Vintage, 1994

"The Exact Mechanism of Terror"
It would be false to say that I was ever truly familiar with the situation in El Salvador at any time, not truly, and what makes Didion's Salvador such an extraordinary essay is that it so thoroughly and eloquently elucidates a time and place, but does so with specifics that feel as endemic to any political crisis now, or any 100 years ago. In her first chapter, she describes her experience in ...

Run River

6 reviews
Joan Didion

Pocket, 1981

A Californian Elegy
This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly ...

Political Fictions

20 reviews
Joan Didion

Knopf, 2001

Shrewd and Absorbing Look At The Political Elite!
More than seventy years ago H.L. Mencken satirized the politicians of his day by counseling the American people that we had the best Congress money could buy. Even then many observers seemed to understand that power politics served the needs of the elite, not the man in the street. Yet gradually this trend toward a polity more and more exclusively organized and perpetuated for the sole purpose of ...

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