SLOUCH TWDS BETH - Softcover

Joan Didion

4.19

67,127 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671495887 ISBN 13: 9780671495886

Publisher: Pocket, 1968

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Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.

Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion's first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the "best prose written in this country."

More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion's focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and 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. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: "[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control."

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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

"A slant vision that is arresting and unique...Didion might be an observer from another planet--one so edgy and alert that she ends up knowing more about our own world than we know ourselves." --Anne Tyler

"The story between the lines of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is surely not so much 'California' as it is [Didion's] ability to make us share her passionate sense of it." --Alfred Kazin

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'

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