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A period piece, but some of it is classic Jan 16, 2001 (21 of 21 found this helpful)
Decades after the fact, this collection of essays is a bit of a period piece, but some of it holds up quite well. The subject of the famous title story -- which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 -- is about the Haight Street scene and, more to the point, the breakdown of human connection that Didion believed that scene represented. She is similarly gloomy about New York in "Goodbye to All That," and about California in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." Though she was in her late 20s and early 30s when she wrote this material, she clearly saw much of what was going on in the 1960s as the activities of a different generation from her own. In any case it's these pieces, along with one about John Wayne, that stand out here, and remain, after all these years, pretty close to extraordinary. Some of the other material (a piece about Joan Baez, etc.) is less memorable. I bought this in the hardback Modern Library edition with a useless introductory essay by Elizabeth Hardwick (but a great photo of Didion on the front cover). Should've gone with paper.
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excellent example of the essay form Sep 2, 2005 (27 of 29 found this helpful)
Didion's collection of essays was recommended to me by writing instructors as an example of excellent essay writing. I found it to be just that. In the first third, she writes a series of remarkable essays about California in the late 1960s. The middle third contains personal essays. And the book finishes with a collection of essays about different places she's been - New York, Hartford, Hawaii, Sacramento.
What makes her writing most impressive is her masterful presentation of portraits, inserting herself just occasionally to remind the reader of who the photographer was, to inject humanity. She does an excellent job combining place and character and shows that long sentences can work. This book is useful both an as example to those who aspire to writing better essays and as a memorable voice from the 1960s.
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American Anomie Oct 31, 2001 (36 of 41 found this helpful)
This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties. Many pieces in the first and third sections of the book ("Lifestyles in the Golden Land" and "Seven Places of the Mind") seem rather dated; the piece which made the most impression on this reviewer was the least ambitious of the group; to me, the portrait of Comrade Laski of the CPUSA-ML is a tiny masterpiece of irony. The pieces from the second section ("Personals")were much more enjoyable, especially "On Keeping a Notebook" and "On Self-Respect." Overall, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is more memorable for the author's endearing prose style than for the individual essays.
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Didion doesn't slouch Apr 26, 2006 (10 of 10 found this helpful)
I am relieved to have finally read Didion's much acclaimed book of essays, which was published in 1968--and so it's old. So what? Didion is old, too, and probably an even better writer because of it. But even back then her skills were blazingly and brilliantly sharp. Aesthetically the work is not beautiful--there's no poet in Didion, although the title of the book is from a fantastically riveting poem by Yeats, which she quotes prior to the preface. Beauty is no matter, however, because Didion's essays are the archetype, the Platonic Form; put simply: the way it should be done. The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section is comprised of essays on 1960s California. It is here that we find Didion's diamond, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", which is a quasi-insider's view of San Francisco's Haight-Ashberry drug culture circa 1967. Other memorable essays from this group include an elegy-esque piece for John Wayne titled, "John Wayne: A Love Song" and "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38", a portrait of California wealth painted in the image of Howard Hughs. The second group of essays is a collection of Didion's personal reflections on subjects such as self-respect, morality, and the poignant "On Going Home". Didion ends the book with a series of seven essays on places she has visited: Hawaii, Mexico, Alcatraz, Los Angeles, to name a few. Here her ruminations are vivid and blunt, but also exciting. The reader feels as though she has taken a trip of sorts to the places Didion portrays so clearly and persuasively. Clear and persuasive are Didion's hallmarks. Hers is a style whose fruit is a truly a masterful group of essays.
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Revealing grab bag of 'new journalism' from the '60's Jun 8, 1999 (15 of 17 found this helpful)
Like a lot of folks I have a fascination with the '60's and the title essay from this collection, a look at the hippie 'scene' in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, is one of the classic contemporary reports on the counter-culture. Ironically the title, picked from Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming', was intended to suggest that hippiedom was the coming paradigm; in reality Didion completed her essay shortly before the 'death of the hippie'. She did no real investigating and so never saw the beatnik connection: the hippies were both a continuation of Beat philosophy and a human overload that collapsed the fragile community that had developed in the area in the early '60's. The irony is compounded by another essay in the collection in which she revisits her childhood town - Sacramento, California's state capital. Didion never mentions it but the Governor was at the time a certain fellow named Ronald Reagan! A Hollywood politician, beneath the notice of such as our journalistic Joan. Well, at least someone WAS slouching toward Bethlehem...
Didion affects a kind of cool, ironic detachment but like Tom Wolfe, another of the formerly 'new' journalists, there is an underlying disdain of her subjects intended to exalt her judgement at their expense. Ultimately she comes across as a small soul in a large and incomprehensible world.