Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

256 pages

Published Oct. 27, 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-53138-6
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4 stars (14 reviews)

1 edition

Review of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

The first section of this collection of Didion's essays read to me like breezy, if intelligent, essays of very little consequence. I'll be honest, I wasn't quite bowled over by them. Then I kept reading. I can only describe the experience as intellectually thrilling. Didion is a masterful writer and the way she points her mind at subjects small and large is overwhelming. Just take the end of her essay On Morality and see how insightful it is for our current (November 10th, 2020) circumstances, politically:

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing-beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what is "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in …

Review of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)' on Goodreads

5 stars

1) "I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

2) "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and …

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