Rating: 
Summary: Amazing California
Review: I grew up in the mountains south of Yosemite in the 1950's and 60's and have lived here ever since. I've worked as a logger, carpenter, and building designer and now spend much of my time hiking the trails in the High Sierra (not in that Arizona nursing home yet).
Anyway, I've had a lifetime spent drinking in the reality that is California. Reading Joan Didion's book has furthered and edified my knowledge, thoughts, and intuitions of this region. Reviewers who think she is upset or complaining are missing the point. Didion delves deep and helps people like me fill in some blanks to this fascinating human comedy.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing California
Review: I grew up in the mountains south of Yosemite in the 1950's and 60's and have lived here ever since. I've worked as a logger, carpenter, and building designer and now spend much of my time hiking the trails in the High Sierra (not in that Arizona nursing home yet).
Anyway, I've had a lifetime spent drinking in the reality that is California. Reading Joan Didion's book has furthered and edified my knowledge, thoughts, and intuitions of this region. Reviewers who think she is upset or complaining are missing the point. Didion delves deep and helps people like me fill in some blanks to this fascinating human comedy.
Rating: 
Summary: more about Didion than about California
Review: I think most of the reviewers have missed the point -- this book is not about California, it's about Didion. If you read her novels, the central character is always a woman looking for home and safety and innocence -- Maria in "Play it as it lays" dreams about "the way light strikes filled Mason jars on a windowsill" and brushing her daughter's hair, and Lily in "Run, River" likes to remember waking early on a summer morning and running barefoot through the sprinklers, etc. This longing for home/safety/innocence is the lifetime obsession of certain people (usually women, but not always), and this obsession is EXACTLY the same, whether you're from Sacramento or St. Louis or Syracuse. But the people who lose their home/safety/innocence are the ones who ruthlessly jettison the past (like the California pioneers she denigrates), who abandon people and places without a backward glance. Like Didion did, when she left California and moved to New York City and became a famous journalist. If she had stayed in Sacramento and married a local boy and spent years canning peaches in Mason jars and brushing her daughter's hair, she wouldn't have a subject to write about. Her novels and her nonfiction always tell the same story: I had a sweet innocent life, I ruthlessly left it, now I'm adrift in the big bad world, and I can't get back. It's about her lost innocence, not California's.
Rating:
Summary: Making peace with California
Review: I was disappointed by California the first time I visited and that disappointment deepened into dislike when I happened to live there for a year. And yet I always felt ambivalent about this dislike, because when I went out into the small towns of California, away from the glamor spots and the sprawl, I liked the place and its people ... well enough. Californians felt unknowable to me. They were often so friendly initially, but I never got the feeling that I would ever get to know them any better, no matter how much effort I put into it.
Where I Was From circumvents this dilemma. A native California has decided to tell us some of the secrets of the place: how it has shaped its people and how they in turn have shaped it. One of Didion's revelations is that California has enormous amounts of agricultural land and yet very few Californians call themselves "farmers". Golden State land owners treat their land purely as a commodity and do not have the visceral attachment to the land itself that is found in farmers in the rest of the country. You see how a lot of other things could cascade from this basic difference between Californians and everyone else.
Didion's long discourse on the Spur Posse of Lakewood at first seemed like a digression. But it soon became clear that she sees the nature of the Lakewood community to be a logical latter-day expression of the California socio-historical phenomenon. Lakewood was built only to provide a place for aerospace workers to live. It is housing, not a real community. It is planned rootlessness. And this has consequences.
By relating some of her own family history, Didion reminds us that all Californians are from somewhere else and so must have been more like the rest of us at some point. She suggests that it was the isolation of being on the far side of the Sierras in a land of enormous natural wealth that unmoored and, to some extent, unhinged Californians and their culture. I believe her.
Rating:
Summary: Where I Was From
Review: The latest from Didion is a complex and challenging memoir, difficult to enter into but just as difficult to put down. It manifests Didion's continued interest in social disorder and unrest, the "telling detail," and how the personal and the social intertwine. On one level, this is a very personal story of Didion's family's history that starts with the birth of her great-times-five grandmother on the Virginia frontier in 1766. On another, it is a critique of American ideals of independence and the story of how the settling of California-and the character of the original settlers-led inexorably to the California of today. Didion is an acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written numerous articles, essays, and reviews. Those who have long admired the clarity and precision of her prose will not be disappointed with this partly autobiographical, partly historical, but fully engrossing account. Suitable for academic libraries and most public libraries, this is of particular interest to genealogists and American history collectors and is essential for libraries in California.
Rating:
Summary: Where I Was From
Review: The latest from Didion is a complex and challenging memoir, difficult to enter into but just as difficult to put down. It manifests Didion's continued interest in social disorder and unrest, the "telling detail," and how the personal and the social intertwine. On one level, this is a very personal story of Didion's family's history that starts with the birth of her great-times-five grandmother on the Virginia frontier in 1766. On another, it is a critique of American ideals of independence and the story of how the settling of California-and the character of the original settlers-led inexorably to the California of today. Didion is an acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written numerous articles, essays, and reviews. Those who have long admired the clarity and precision of her prose will not be disappointed with this partly autobiographical, partly historical, but fully engrossing account. Suitable for academic libraries and most public libraries, this is of particular interest to genealogists and American history collectors and is essential for libraries in California.
Rating:
Summary: America's greatest writer pops out her best book yet
Review: This is possibly as close as the famously oblique Joan Didion will ever come to writing a memoir. It takes a master stylist to weave together such disparate threads as one family's heritage, manifest destiny, Didion's eighth-grade commencement speech, her first novel (an atavistically brave move), the works of other writers (Jack London, Victor Davis Hansen), notes on pop painter Thomas Kinkade and Lakewood's infamous "Spur Posse," and more.I can't think of any writer could do a better job than Didion at examining the weird admixture of passion and ambivalence that a native Californian may have for her state. I share it, and I admire this book especially because I know the terrain she dissects and lays bare. Her spare prose is a joy to read.
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