Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics) - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374531382 ISBN 13: 9780374531386

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America--particularly California--in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

About this title

Review

"In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful . . . A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country." --Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover

"It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not..."

"So physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate" that people tended to forget that her presence ran counter to their best interests, Joan Didion slipped herself into the heart of the Sixties Revolution, only to slip out again with this savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during those curious days. Now that some of the posturing and pronouncements of those times are being recycled, Didion's sobering reflections are timely once again: 'the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."

"Didion's essays of a world featuring barricades and bombings, mass murders and kidnapped heiresses make recent history as filtered through her seem a savage and passionate drama, something you can put a hand on and feel it beating, something you can put your ear to and hear its story."
VILLAGE VOICE

"Brilliant, troubling, indelible tales and reflections."
SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE

"Reveals a wholly original analytic mind, a sensibility as expansive and idiosyncratic as a 19th-century novelist's."
MONA SIMPSON

"Our quintessential essayist."
JERRY KOSINSKI, 'LA Times'

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0374531382
• ISBN 13: 9780374531386
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256