The White Album: Essays (FSG Classics) - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374532079 ISBN 13: 9780374532079

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era--including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall--through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

About this title

Review

"[Didion] can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes." --San Francisco Chronicle

"All of the essays--even the slightest--manifest not only [Didion's] intelligence, but an instinct for details that continue to emit pulsations in the reader's memory and a style that is spare, subtly musical in its phrasing and exact. Add to these her highly vulnerable sense of herself, and the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism." --Robert Towers, The New York Times Book Review

"Didion manages to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O'Keeffe, the Hoover Dam, the mountains around Bogota). . . A timely and elegant collection." --The New Yorker

From the Back Cover

'All the essays manifest not only her intelligence but an instinct for details that continue to emit pulsations in the reader's memory, and a style that is spare, subtly musical in its phrasing, and exact. Add to this her highly vulnerable sense of herself, and the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism.'
NEW YORK TIMES

'Demonstrates an uncanny ability to capture the insidious and pervasive infections of mind and spirit that have led to both the corruption of government and business, and the withering of the individual.'
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

'Everything Didion writes has a land's end edginess to it – a hyperattentive eye on the dramas found at the outskirts of the human condition. She writes as someone who has come through great shudders of the earth with a fundamental understanding that everything is subject to instantaneous and complete revision.'
VILLAGE VOICE

'She is the best chronicler California has'
VOGUE

'Simply an original and unexpected writer who is never banal'
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0374532079
• ISBN 13: 9780374532079
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224