Joan Didion
Paperback | Pages: 238 pages Rating: 4.21 | 33705 Users | 2588 Reviews
List Of Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
| Title | : | Slouching Towards Bethlehem |
| Author | : | Joan Didion |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 238 pages |
| Published | : | October 1st 1990 by Farrar Straus Giroux (first published 1968) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. Autobiography. Memoir. History. Classics. Short Stories |
Ilustration During Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book.I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values.
Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write, clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drug, sex, and rock-n-roll.
I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper.
This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism—here is a writer, a woman, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Or unafraid to admit a lifelong crush on the manufactured, wooden John Wayne, a caricature of the American man.
Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where
". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."
Oh, don't we all?
Define Books To Slouching Towards Bethlehem
| Original Title: | Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays |
| ISBN: | 0374521727 (ISBN13: 9780374521721) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Of Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Ratings: 4.21 From 33705 Users | 2588 ReviewsCrit Of Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I decided to get my Joan Didion on this summer in preparation for the biography that comes out next month, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first essay collection, seemed like a good place to start. It's true that some of these essays are hopelessly dated, kind of like those true-crime articles that appear in Vanity Fair that no one's going to care about in five months, let alone fifty years (although the majority of these particular essays were published in The Saturday Evening Post). ButHow can one possibly not love Joan Didion be it for her fiction or non-fiction. These twenty essays demonstrate her skills not only as a journalist but also as an incredible author. I must confess the essay on Howard Hughes scintillated me. As for the title which I found very unusual. I was intrigued to see that W.B. Yeats was Didion's inspiration, as shown in the last two sentences of his poem:"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"Why did she
Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write.
Beautifully written essays from way back in 1967 from a journalist who successfully captured the essence of America as it woke from its idealistic dream into the deep feeling that all was not all right.Maybe this is old news for today's world, but I can still express my appreciation for one of the best non-fiction writers of the age, exposing sensationalist murders, the seedy underbelly of the Flower Power movement, and the failed idealism of many other movements... and modes of thought not
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. -from
My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray
This is the book that made me fall in love with Joan Didion. Her prose is like a razor. What style she has. Her essays in this collection prove that it's not what you write but how you write it. Of course, I appreciated her subject matter too and her eye for a good story, and the way she cut through social issues, as she did the hippie myths of Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s in San Francisco.One of my favorites is one called, "On Keeping a Notebook," where the great Didion talks about writing
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