Status
Checked out
Publication
(2009)
Description
An extraordinary report on the aftermath of the 1960's in America by the New York Times-bestselling author of South and West and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own "bad dreams" with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960's counterculture. From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the "giddily splendid" Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus's footsteps-and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls-"toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes"-and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women's movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders-a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no on… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member nohablo
O JOAN. As much as I loathe her frail-artiste pretentions - probably exacerbated by the fact that every precocious, precious, gamine shit whoever shopped a creative writing class bit her style shamelessly and badly - Didion can be absolutely stunning.
At her best and shorn of her overworn
She's not always absolutely coherent - the people she meets, the places she explores don't allow for that - but her eloquence and articulation and fanatic persistence in including EVERYTHING are admirable and breathtaking in their own right. She's got a one-in-a-million set of eyes and thankfully a pen and voice to match. In a strange way, her clarity and her restraint remind me of Orwell a bit, with more frill, more baby-fat (not hard) and minus the sort of heart-hearted political twist.
At her best and shorn of her overworn
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neurasthenic security blanket, she has a gimlet eye capable of dissecting the messy, pulsating core of pure Americana. Didion describes with a sort of preternatural, almost omniscient clarity, prying into the still-beating heart of the 60s, 70s, 80,s WHENEVER. She can be that oracle - a master of picking apart a society to its ticking cogs. And yet, she also refuses to Explain It All; she's a translator, not a storyteller, which can be frustrating. It'd be FANTASTIC to harness that ultracharged feverish mind to make some clarity, some sense out of, you know, THIS WORLD. But this same reluctance to explain is also the source of her essays' powers and strengths. Because Didion's so unwilling to hammer her obversations into the straitjacket of some prescribed, prefab narrative, she's allowed to keep that widened aperture, recording everything that flashes across her always dilated pupils without pruning out the complicated bits - the interesting bits. She's not always absolutely coherent - the people she meets, the places she explores don't allow for that - but her eloquence and articulation and fanatic persistence in including EVERYTHING are admirable and breathtaking in their own right. She's got a one-in-a-million set of eyes and thankfully a pen and voice to match. In a strange way, her clarity and her restraint remind me of Orwell a bit, with more frill, more baby-fat (not hard) and minus the sort of heart-hearted political twist.
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LibraryThing member Crazymamie
I think what Joan Didion is very good at is setting the stage and making you feel present in the moment, even when that moment happened decades ago. She is cagey. She is writing for herself first, capturing those images and those facts in prose that will reflect the minutia back to you like a
This collection, like most collections of anything has an unevenness. The brilliant shares space with the adequate and the puzzling. I wonder at why some of the entries were included. BUT the title essay is a gorgeous example of how to present a decade for consumption - she delivers to us the 60s by giving us a glimpse of her own life in that decade. Small vignettes that form a collage representing the whole. And the opening dialogue has become iconic:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Divided into five sections, each with a theme, the collection contains a total of twenty essays. I liked most of them, and I loved several - the collection is worth having just for the title essay, in my opinion. Highly recommended if you like essays with the caveat that the title essay is by far the best of the bunch.
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mirror. She is in every word, you can feel her presence, her careful crafting of each sentence, but she is elusive. So what is she saying? How did that make her feel? What is she getting at? Some of her essays beg to be read more than once, to be delved into time and time again. And this is what makes her brilliant - what she has to say isn't the point - it is how she says it. She has preserved the moment, the day, the decade in all of its glory or shame. She has laid the trivial beside the momentous and in doing so has made it timeless. It is not flat - it has dimension. This collection, like most collections of anything has an unevenness. The brilliant shares space with the adequate and the puzzling. I wonder at why some of the entries were included. BUT the title essay is a gorgeous example of how to present a decade for consumption - she delivers to us the 60s by giving us a glimpse of her own life in that decade. Small vignettes that form a collage representing the whole. And the opening dialogue has become iconic:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Divided into five sections, each with a theme, the collection contains a total of twenty essays. I liked most of them, and I loved several - the collection is worth having just for the title essay, in my opinion. Highly recommended if you like essays with the caveat that the title essay is by far the best of the bunch.
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LibraryThing member nostalgebraist
I'd read and enjoyed some of Didion's essays before, and it's good to hear that voice again -- that sardonic, incisive, precise, world-weary, world-wary, sensitive yet pleasantly sort of robotic voice.
LibraryThing member KristySP
Joan Didion is one special lady. I appreciate her honesty most of all in this book.
LibraryThing member MSarki
Loved most of what I read, which was the majority of the book, but some of it was of no interest to me. However, her writing is magnificent. I loved the titled essay and it was heartwarming to again revisit the 60's and early 70's with Joan Didion as my guide. Her picture on the back of the
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hardcover jacket is so flattering of her. Smart woman. I also thoroughly enjoyed her essay on migraine headaches and how she learned to deal with them. Show Less
LibraryThing member cat-ballou
I've wanted to read Joan Didion since The Year of Magical Thinking came out. However, that's apparently not a good one to start with. So I'm starting with this one, quite enjoying it so far, and planning on getting to The Year of Magical Thinking next.
10/20: Change of plans: Slouching Towards
10/20: Change of plans: Slouching Towards
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Bethlehem is also amazing, according to multiple sources. So now that one is next, and then The Year of Magical Thinking. Show Less
LibraryThing member lucybrown
I read The White Album as a college freshman; it was one of my introductory selection for Book of the Month Club along with the poems of Robert Frost, the Collected Stories of John Cheever, and one of Sholom Aleichem. I am not sure why or how I singled out Didion's collection of essays. I had never
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run up against a writer quite like Didion. For one, the essayist I had read on my own, that is the ones that weren't straight out philosophy or literary criticism, had been "jokey" affairs, Woody Allen, Fran Leibowitz. Didion's take on what was very recent history and the fairly current state of American culture was not jaundiced and flippant as those writers were; Joan does joke around. I remember her observations as intelligent, but there was an icy edge. I would not say it was a neutrality, but a definite lack of warmth. This is a collection I would like to revisit. Show Less
LibraryThing member lucybrown
I read The White Album as a college freshman; it was one of my introductory selection for Book of the Month Club along with the poems of Robert Frost, the Collected Stories of John Cheever, and one of Sholom Aleichem. I am not sure why or how I singled out Didion's collection of essays. I had never
Show More
run up against a writer quite like Didion. For one, the essayist I had read on my own, that is the ones that weren't straight out philosophy or literary criticism, had been "jokey" affairs, Woody Allen, Fran Leibowitz. Didion's take on what was very recent history and the fairly current state of American culture was not jaundiced and flippant as those writers were; Joan does joke around. I remember her observations as intelligent, but there was an icy edge. I would not say it was a neutrality, but a definite lack of warmth. This is a collection I would like to revisit. Show Less
LibraryThing member lucybrown
I read The White Album as a college freshman; it was one of my introductory selection for Book of the Month Club along with the poems of Robert Frost, the Collected Stories of John Cheever, and one of Sholom Aleichem. I am not sure why or how I singled out Didion's collection of essays. I had never
Show More
run up against a writer quite like Didion. For one, the essayist I had read on my own, that is the ones that weren't straight out philosophy or literary criticism, had been "jokey" affairs, Woody Allen, Fran Leibowitz. Didion's take on what was very recent history and the fairly current state of American culture was not jaundiced and flippant as those writers were; Joan does joke around. I remember her observations as intelligent, but there was an icy edge. I would not say it was a neutrality, but a definite lack of warmth. This is a collection I would like to revisit. Show Less
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
I tend to think that people can be separated into those that like and those that don't like Didion. I like her and find her essays interesting - with some more personal and therefore [I think] more successful than others.
LibraryThing member gbelik
Joan Didion really finds herself as a remarkable essayist in this collection in which she reflects in America in the 1970s. She finds topics that illuminate the era and she writes thoughtfully about what she sees and what she thinks about. A pleasure to read!
LibraryThing member mahallett
joan is very annoying or her writing style is annoying but she has a style and she draws you in.
LibraryThing member FKarr
took years to read every essay; some are so poignant and pointed that I till reread them
LibraryThing member FormerEnglishTeacher
I’ve read two Didion books now, the other being “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her 2005 memoir of the year following the unexpected death of her husband. That book won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize. Sad as it was, I liked it more than “The While Album.” This book is about all
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things California. Well, all things related to the Beautiful People in California in the 1960s and 1970s. Didion knew many of these people and spoke of them as you and I would speak of the names of the streets we’ve lived on in our lifetimes. That part of this memoir was mildly irritating to me, but the payoff with anything Didion has written is the writing itself. It may be second to none. When I think of the Writers’ Club Joan Didion is in, I think of the likes of Tom Wolfe, George Will, people like that. It’s very special writing indeed, and it’s worth the price of admission. Show Less
LibraryThing member msf59
"The beaches at Malibu are neither white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never seen it,
I think that paragraph sums up, this collection of essays. A mosaic of snaphots, from the 60s and 70s, captured in Didion's deft, slightly aloof style, with razor-sharp insight and vivid imagery. Not every essay here sings, but there are plenty that do and she covers a lot of territory too, although the bulk, are centered around California. The collection opens with the title essay and it is a stunner. If you only want to read one, make it that one.
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and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life. I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it."I think that paragraph sums up, this collection of essays. A mosaic of snaphots, from the 60s and 70s, captured in Didion's deft, slightly aloof style, with razor-sharp insight and vivid imagery. Not every essay here sings, but there are plenty that do and she covers a lot of territory too, although the bulk, are centered around California. The collection opens with the title essay and it is a stunner. If you only want to read one, make it that one.
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LibraryThing member b.masonjudy
My first exposure to Didion and its made an impression. This collection of essays is solid gold, if you aren't interested in things like water distribution in California or the Governor's Residence I guarantee after reading Didion you will be. Her writing is so well constructed and at the end of
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each essay I was left quite dumbstruck (except "Doris Lessing" that just seemed like a cheap shot) and her wit is absolutely scathing. If you are stuck for time at least read Part II: California Republic but I'd highly recommend all of it. Show Less
LibraryThing member CarltonC
A wonderful style, a cool voice, but one you trust to tell it how it is, whatever it is.
Over thirty years ago I read George Orwell’s non-fiction, his journalism, his books, his essays and even his letters. He would write about saucy seaside postcards or roses from Woolworths, and it didn’t
Didion does that, although the voice is entirely different.
Well worth the time.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.
Over thirty years ago I read George Orwell’s non-fiction, his journalism, his books, his essays and even his letters. He would write about saucy seaside postcards or roses from Woolworths, and it didn’t
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matter that you had had no interest in the subject matter, but Orwell made the subject real in his writing.Didion does that, although the voice is entirely different.
Well worth the time.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.
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LibraryThing member AdonisGuilfoyle
I initially only wanted to read Joan Didion's essays because she covers Los Angeles of the late 1960s, at the time of the Cielo Drive murders: 'I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised'. But there
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are also a lot of other random subjects, from Hollywood to Hawaii, shopping malls and traffic systems, the Hoover Dam and piping water into the arid landscape of California. I enjoyed 'The White Album' and the personal details in her writing - 'I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people' - but did start skim-reading through some of the other articles. Show Less
LibraryThing member stravinsky
it is nice when anyone can eloquently transcribe their thoughts.
LibraryThing member kevn57
I loved this book, a raw look at the late 60's early 70s.
“Something we should stress at this press conference is who owns the media.”
“You don’t think it’s common knowledge that the papers represent corporate interests?” a realist among them interjected doubtfully.
“I don’t think
That's a quote from the book about striking students. How did we get from students who understood that the media was a business, run by corporations that were out for themselves to today where a vast segment of the American population believes that somehow the left controls the media.
Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and she wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later.
She writes about the Doors as well.
Most of these other people were members of the Black Panther Party, but one of them, in the living room, was Eldridge Cleaver’s parole officer. It seems to me that I stayed about an hour. It seems to me that the three of us—Eldridge Cleaver, his parole officer and I—mainly discussed the commercial prospects of Soul on Ice, which, it happened, was being published that day. We discussed the advance ($5,000). We discussed the size of the first printing (10,000 copies). We discussed the advertising budget and we discussed the bookstores in which copies were or were not available. It was a not unusual discussion between writers, with the difference that one of the writers had his parole officer there and the other had stood out on Oak Street and been visually frisked before coming inside.
"After spending seven years in exile in Cuba, Algeria, and France, Cleaver returned to the US in 1975, where he became involved in various religious groups (Unification Church and CARP) before finally joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as becoming a conservative Republican, appearing at Republican events" wikipedia
It was a weird time and lots of weird stuff happened and this book does a great job showing just some of the oddities.
“Something we should stress at this press conference is who owns the media.”
“You don’t think it’s common knowledge that the papers represent corporate interests?” a realist among them interjected doubtfully.
“I don’t think
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it’s understood!’That's a quote from the book about striking students. How did we get from students who understood that the media was a business, run by corporations that were out for themselves to today where a vast segment of the American population believes that somehow the left controls the media.
Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and she wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later.
She writes about the Doors as well.
Most of these other people were members of the Black Panther Party, but one of them, in the living room, was Eldridge Cleaver’s parole officer. It seems to me that I stayed about an hour. It seems to me that the three of us—Eldridge Cleaver, his parole officer and I—mainly discussed the commercial prospects of Soul on Ice, which, it happened, was being published that day. We discussed the advance ($5,000). We discussed the size of the first printing (10,000 copies). We discussed the advertising budget and we discussed the bookstores in which copies were or were not available. It was a not unusual discussion between writers, with the difference that one of the writers had his parole officer there and the other had stood out on Oak Street and been visually frisked before coming inside.
"After spending seven years in exile in Cuba, Algeria, and France, Cleaver returned to the US in 1975, where he became involved in various religious groups (Unification Church and CARP) before finally joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as becoming a conservative Republican, appearing at Republican events" wikipedia
It was a weird time and lots of weird stuff happened and this book does a great job showing just some of the oddities.
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LibraryThing member RajivC
Joan Didion is - was - a fine writer, who wrote essays and books with felicity. I liked some of the essays in the book, particularly "The White Album". The essay on aspects of California, like the one about the governor's house, is excellent, as is the essay on lying in bed.
The rest made no sense
The rest made no sense
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to me, because I did not understand the context. The problem with essays of this kind, is that they are bound to the cultural or political context in which they are written. If you don't understand the context, then the essays are meaningless, and the writing seems circular and tortuous. Show Less
LibraryThing member AngelaJMaher
I didn't know what to expect with this, but I found it interesting and absorbing. Her style is at times rambling, but conversational as though you're talking over coffee. She brings fragments of time to vibrant life, sometimes painting the everyday as beautiful or awe worthy. These essays are
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accessible, intelligent explorations, and certainly worth diving into. Show Less
LibraryThing member robfwalter
I adored this book. Didion writes beautifully, with a quickness and wit that is the equal of anything I've read. An essay can be heading on one direction, instantly turn on its head for a sentence or paragraph and then resume its original course, or change direction yet again. Everything is full of
So is there anything deeper here, or is it just an exercise in aesthetics? Well first of all, what does "just aesthetics" mean? But second, yes I think there is. These essays are a celebration of curiosity and a warning against seriousness. Didion is modelling a spirit of enquiry and lightness which would make the world a much better place. She's not apolitical, in fact the timelessness of her political commentary is testament to the power of her approach. By looking at personality, style and rhetoric, she more accurately characterises the political temper of the time than the serious pundits and experts whose commentary long ago grew stale.
And that style! Everything is so clearly described and laden with meaning. It's a pleasure to read and wonderfully entertaining, which is exactly what a book should be.
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meaning, but as she explains in one of the later essays, it's not some meaning about the world, but only ever a personal one. Orchids, the Hoover Dam and serial killers are worth writing about because they're interesting, not because they're significant. It's a follow your nose attitude to intellectual life that makes Didion very fun company.So is there anything deeper here, or is it just an exercise in aesthetics? Well first of all, what does "just aesthetics" mean? But second, yes I think there is. These essays are a celebration of curiosity and a warning against seriousness. Didion is modelling a spirit of enquiry and lightness which would make the world a much better place. She's not apolitical, in fact the timelessness of her political commentary is testament to the power of her approach. By looking at personality, style and rhetoric, she more accurately characterises the political temper of the time than the serious pundits and experts whose commentary long ago grew stale.
And that style! Everything is so clearly described and laden with meaning. It's a pleasure to read and wonderfully entertaining, which is exactly what a book should be.
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LibraryThing member fmclellan
I have had this book on my shelves for years. Finally got around to reading it in one gulp while flying to Manila. Classic Didion. Cool, closely observed, with quirky connections.
LibraryThing member Carmenere
From the water and transportation systems of Southern California to Schofield Barracks and the Punchbowl Crater of Hawaii, from artist's to civil unrest, Journalist Joan Didion was there to cover it.
The selection of essays she as chosen for The White Album do not necessarily concern everybody but
The selection of essays she as chosen for The White Album do not necessarily concern everybody but
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everybody who is concerned or just a little bit interested in the volatile and madcap late 1960's and early 1970's will find the collection fairly interesting and her prose slightly addictive. The focus is undoubtedly on California yet, that portion is, strangely fascinating. This could be in part for the people she's inserted into the essays. They give life to what, otherwise, for many non Californians, could have been a compilation of uninteresting stories. Show Less
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — 1981)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — General Nonfiction — 1979)
Original publication date
1979
Physical description
8.43 inches
Local notes
essays