Collected Nonfiction Everyman's library -- 304
Hardcover, 1122 pages
English language
Published Feb. 9, 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf.
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions - on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others - show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream."--BOOK …
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions - on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others - show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream."--BOOK JACKET
I probably shouldn't rate this as I haven't read every essay in the book. But I read at least half. Some I found more interesting than others and that is due primarily to what I personally care about. Some are dated of course and some are timeless.
I like Joan Didion though. She is an excellent, intelligent writer.
First, a disclaimer: having read [b:Slouching Towards Bethlehem|424|Slouching Towards Bethlehem Essays|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266447868s/424.jpg|1844], [b:The White Album|421|The White Album|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/421.jpg|682500], and [b:Where I Was From|423|Where I Was From (Vintage International)|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/423.jpg|1371028] before, I skipped those sections of the anthology and read the parts I hadn't seen before.
[a:Joan Didion|238|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1294506024p2/238.jpg] is a first-class writer and journalist, so much so that even reading today about the behind-the-scenes intrigues of a 25-year-old Los Angeles mayoral race remains gripping.
Her best journalistic virtue is not that she gets the scoop that nobody else gets, but that she reports the interesting things that all the reporters know but that they keep concealed because they would embarrass the reporters' fraternity or they wouldn't fit the formula or the reporters aren't savvy enough to know that what interests them would also interest their readers if only they knew how to convey it.
Not for her is "the genuflection …
First, a disclaimer: having read [b:Slouching Towards Bethlehem|424|Slouching Towards Bethlehem Essays|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266447868s/424.jpg|1844], [b:The White Album|421|The White Album|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/421.jpg|682500], and [b:Where I Was From|423|Where I Was From (Vintage International)|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/423.jpg|1371028] before, I skipped those sections of the anthology and read the parts I hadn't seen before.
[a:Joan Didion|238|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1294506024p2/238.jpg] is a first-class writer and journalist, so much so that even reading today about the behind-the-scenes intrigues of a 25-year-old Los Angeles mayoral race remains gripping.
Her best journalistic virtue is not that she gets the scoop that nobody else gets, but that she reports the interesting things that all the reporters know but that they keep concealed because they would embarrass the reporters' fraternity or they wouldn't fit the formula or the reporters aren't savvy enough to know that what interests them would also interest their readers if only they knew how to convey it.
Not for her is "the genuflection toward 'fairness'"
...a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. ...[W]hat 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.
I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illustrate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.
