Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Didion, Joan

4.19

67,095 ratings by Goodreads

9780679640264: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Modern Library)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679640266 ISBN 13: 9780679640264

Publisher: Modern Library, 2000

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Collects essays on such diverse topics as John Wayne, the Haight-Asbury culture, and the Newport mansions.

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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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