Rating: 
Summary: Insipid and ridiculous
Review: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I can't think of a more gripping, more involving first line which I've read in recent memory.I think this book is more accomplished than Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She is more present in this book, I believe; she is more willing to show herself and her... neuroses to the reader and I think she is more devastating with her criticisms. Her target in this book seems to be the wealth of the West: Hollywood and the stars with their civil rights parties and their malls and mansions. She's virtually sinister in her essay "The Women's Movement" and also in "Doris Lessing." I can't figure her stance in "Georgia O'Keefe," but I believe it to be one of admiration. But there's an effect which Didion creates with her "presence" in the book - one which I didn't notice when I read "Slouching." I'm sure there are a myriad reasons why she elected to have her self close to the narrative, to be the camera from which all the details are depicted rather than a Wolfian approach to playing some sort of narrative, detached god with his omniscience and novel-like approach, but the effect which she achieves for me is something of interest: she seems to contain very little physical strength. When I think of Didion, as a person, I picture her as physically small and frail. Neurotic, almost. I get this impression from the way in which she talks about her migraines and from the doctor's reports which she so boldly placed right in the text of her book. I get this weakness when I think about "On the Road," how she's not content to be away from home on a book tour. In "In the Islands" she displays her fragile state in the context of her marriage, and the tidal wave which she is waiting for is both a literal one and a metaphorical one: both of which don't show up. So the achieved effect is that Didion is shrouded in what she depicts as weaknesses, and you tend to forget, after reading her works, that there is a scornful mind in that psychoses-ridden body which is ready to attack unabashedly at whatever seems contemptible in American life. I was floored by what she said in her essay "The Women's Movement." It was so mean... so smart... but overall what surprised me is that she said it. The same thing can be said for the essay "Hollywood." These are two prime examples of "Didion on the attack," not "Didion I'm going to share with you my mindframe." It's the combination of the two (sharing essays and attacking essays) which constitutes the strength of this book. Didion conceals how threatening her opinions really are, debasing the arrogance of someone like Tom Wolfe, who doesn't appear to be articulating any form of mental breakdown anytime soon. Her mentality also justifies her criticisms, too. By explaining where she is psychologically, she is explaining why she needs to write about what she sees... what purpose it has. She explains what draws her to the sickest of stories in American life (both the murderer and Hollywood). The effect of society on her is what she's writing about. When she turns around and writes something so honest and devastating, so seemingly mean and discrediting, it's not coming from some ethicist: it's coming from someone who truly feels agonized mentally by what is happening all around her. A riveting, smart and sometimes funny read - I cannot recommend it too highly.
Rating: 
Summary: contemporary culture from a Didion's-eye-view...
Review: ....her fine prose unpeels the life in So. California and exposes it to us in all its marvelous and wannabe glamor. Her critique of "The Women's Movement"--that (in my terms) the victim-thinking, entitlement, and pie-in-the-sky idealism of some of its staunchest party-liners reveal more about the damage done by the patriarchy than the propaganda does--remains relevant, unfortunately.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing
Review: Didion is a master essayist with an excellent command of the English language. The quality of her prose alone justifies a 5-star rating.
Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Review: Do you ever have a group of authors that you just can't differentiate in your mind? I get that sometimes with writers, particularly those who I haven't read as they were writing. Like I finally just read a book by Eric Hoffer, whose stuff I'd always seen around but who I continually confused with Eric Fromm, Eric Erickson and a couple other guys who were popular in the '60s. Similarly, I've never been able to keep Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Joyce Carol Oates straight, but I was sure I didn't like at least a couple of them and had no desire to sort through and figure out which. What a revelation then to pick up a book of Joan Didion's essays; they are terrific. The first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, opens with an introduction by the author, in which she says that the title is a reference to Yeats's great poem The Second Coming, with which many of the essays share an apocalyptic vision : 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart It is this realization that animates both this collection and The White Album (which should really be read together), the sense that American society was splintering in the 60s and 70s and that traditional moral and cultural restraints could no longer hold it together. Whether she's writing about a sensational murder or profiling California celebrities, discussing student demonstrations, the Black Panthers or the Women's Movement, or portraying her own physical and emotional problems, the consistent theme is one of the breakdown of the social order, or of the American psyche. But there's also a strong subtext which shows that the center, though embattled, really is holding; it is the margins, both at the upper and the lower ends of the social spectrum which are falling apart. The real danger lies in the middle's loss of confidence in it's own beliefs, a crisis of faith. The disintegration at the bottom of the social scale is most clear in her reporting on crime, drug culture and the inanity of youth, racial and gender politics. But she lays the blame squarely, and fairly, at the feet of Middle America, as here when she's discussing the failure to provide any guidance to America's youth : At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing . . . These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words. Now, normally, those words would come from parents, clergy, schools, etc., but self doubt inhibited their willingness to impart them, and kept them from enunciating these ideals to the rest of society. The reason for their timidity is made apparent in a batch of essays which celebrate middle class good sense and sensibilities while contrasting them to the snobbishness and self-righteousness of elites. In essays on John Wayne, Howard Hughes, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Reagan-built California Governor's Mansion, Didion shows how out of touch intellectual opinion is with these symbols that the rest of us find so appealing. Here she is on the mansion : A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal. It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence. Meanwhile, the current governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,1000 annual salary. This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river. It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have 'never seen' the house on the river. The governor himself has 'never seen' it. The governor's press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has 'never seen' it. The governor's chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when 'Mary McGrory wanted to see it.' This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, 'not my style.' As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river--the house is not Jerry Browne's style, not Mary McGrory's style, not our style--and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown's predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown's constituents. Words are chosen carefully. Reasonable objections are framed. One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature. One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor's temperamental austerity. One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts : it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable. In such a situation, where the proclivities of the opinion-making class had diverged so far from the preferences of the middle class, it would have taken an inordinate amount of courage for middle America to hold it's ground, even more so in the face of the concurrent rebellions by youth, feminists and people of color, all of them attacking traditional tastes, beliefs, and mores. The piece though that most dramatically illustrates this dichotomy and demonstrates just how embattled was Middle America and how arrogant were the intellectuals is the quite devastating, Bureaucrats. In straightforward fashion, all the more effective because understated, she relates the efforts of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to, in the words of it's director : "pry John Q. Public out of his car," by creating Diamond or HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes on the thruways, beginning with the Santa Monica : Of course this political decision was in the name of the greater good, was in the interests of 'environmental improvement' and 'conservation of resources,' but even there the figures had about them a certain Caltrans opacity. The Santa Monica normally carried 240,000 cars and trucks every day. These 240,000 cars and trucks normally carried 260,000 people. What Caltrans described as its ultimate goal on the Santa Monica was to carry the same 260,000 people, 'but in 7,800 fewer, or 232,200 vehicles.' The figure '232,200' had a visionary precision to it that not automatically create confidence, especially since the only effect so far had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the instigation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat. She goes on to show that the bureaucrats at Caltrans are bent on reengineering the behavior of motorists regardless of their resistance and of the disastrous results. The coup de grace is delivered in the final sentence : "Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lanes to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000." It's one of the finest essays I've ever read, exposing the arrogance of little men with too much power. Throughout, the two books are filled with terrific stuff like this and more memorable sentences than you can count. The only weak spots are the predominantly personal essays, which I could have done withou
Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Review: Do you ever have a group of authors that you just can't differentiate in your mind? I get that sometimes with writers, particularly those who I haven't read as they were writing. Like I finally just read a book by Eric Hoffer, whose stuff I'd always seen around but who I continually confused with Eric Fromm, Eric Erickson and a couple other guys who were popular in the '60s. Similarly, I've never been able to keep Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Joyce Carol Oates straight, but I was sure I didn't like at least a couple of them and had no desire to sort through and figure out which. What a revelation then to pick up a book of Joan Didion's essays; they are terrific. The first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, opens with an introduction by the author, in which she says that the title is a reference to Yeats's great poem The Second Coming, with which many of the essays share an apocalyptic vision : 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart It is this realization that animates both this collection and The White Album (which should really be read together), the sense that American society was splintering in the 60s and 70s and that traditional moral and cultural restraints could no longer hold it together. Whether she's writing about a sensational murder or profiling California celebrities, discussing student demonstrations, the Black Panthers or the Women's Movement, or portraying her own physical and emotional problems, the consistent theme is one of the breakdown of the social order, or of the American psyche. But there's also a strong subtext which shows that the center, though embattled, really is holding; it is the margins, both at the upper and the lower ends of the social spectrum which are falling apart. The real danger lies in the middle's loss of confidence in it's own beliefs, a crisis of faith. The disintegration at the bottom of the social scale is most clear in her reporting on crime, drug culture and the inanity of youth, racial and gender politics. But she lays the blame squarely, and fairly, at the feet of Middle America, as here when she's discussing the failure to provide any guidance to America's youth : At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing . . . These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words. Now, normally, those words would come from parents, clergy, schools, etc., but self doubt inhibited their willingness to impart them, and kept them from enunciating these ideals to the rest of society. The reason for their timidity is made apparent in a batch of essays which celebrate middle class good sense and sensibilities while contrasting them to the snobbishness and self-righteousness of elites. In essays on John Wayne, Howard Hughes, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Reagan-built California Governor's Mansion, Didion shows how out of touch intellectual opinion is with these symbols that the rest of us find so appealing. Here she is on the mansion : A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal. It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence. Meanwhile, the current governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,1000 annual salary. This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river. It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have 'never seen' the house on the river. The governor himself has 'never seen' it. The governor's press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has 'never seen' it. The governor's chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when 'Mary McGrory wanted to see it.' This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, 'not my style.' As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river--the house is not Jerry Browne's style, not Mary McGrory's style, not our style--and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown's predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown's constituents. Words are chosen carefully. Reasonable objections are framed. One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature. One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor's temperamental austerity. One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts : it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable. In such a situation, where the proclivities of the opinion-making class had diverged so far from the preferences of the middle class, it would have taken an inordinate amount of courage for middle America to hold it's ground, even more so in the face of the concurrent rebellions by youth, feminists and people of color, all of them attacking traditional tastes, beliefs, and mores. The piece though that most dramatically illustrates this dichotomy and demonstrates just how embattled was Middle America and how arrogant were the intellectuals is the quite devastating, Bureaucrats. In straightforward fashion, all the more effective because understated, she relates the efforts of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to, in the words of it's director : "pry John Q. Public out of his car," by creating Diamond or HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes on the thruways, beginning with the Santa Monica : Of course this political decision was in the name of the greater good, was in the interests of 'environmental improvement' and 'conservation of resources,' but even there the figures had about them a certain Caltrans opacity. The Santa Monica normally carried 240,000 cars and trucks every day. These 240,000 cars and trucks normally carried 260,000 people. What Caltrans described as its ultimate goal on the Santa Monica was to carry the same 260,000 people, 'but in 7,800 fewer, or 232,200 vehicles.' The figure '232,200' had a visionary precision to it that not automatically create confidence, especially since the only effect so far had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the instigation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat. She goes on to show that the bureaucrats at Caltrans are bent on reengineering the behavior of motorists regardless of their resistance and of the disastrous results. The coup de grace is delivered in the final sentence : "Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lanes to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000." It's one of the finest essays I've ever read, exposing the arrogance of little men with too much power. Throughout, the two books are filled with terrific stuff like this and more memorable sentences than you can count. The only weak spots are the predominantly personal essays, which I could have done withou
Rating: 
Summary: People and places of the 60s and 70s
Review: Joan Didion's essays are sharply observed and very personal. She informs us of her fragile mental state in the very first essay, in which she describes a pervasive sense of detachment that she felt from the world. She then goes on to deliver a collection of well-written profiles on personalities, places, and the concerns of the time (late 60s-early 70s). Didion inserts herself and her personal issues into these pieces on ocassion, which no doubt contributes to the accusation by some that she is a whiner. On the contrary, I feel that it was courageous for Didion to reveal herself this way and that the awareness of the narrator as a fragile, flawed individual rather than an omnipotent, god-like commentator pronouncing judgement on its subjects gives a unity and a perspective to these disparate pieces that they would not have possessed otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: People and places of the 60s and 70s
Review: Joan Didion's essays are sharply observed and very personal. She informs us of her fragile mental state in the very first essay, in which she describes a pervasive sense of detachment that she felt from the world. She then goes on to deliver a collection of well-written profiles on personalities, places, and the concerns of the time (late 60s-early 70s). Didion inserts herself and her personal issues into these pieces on ocassion, which no doubt contributes to the accusation by some that she is a whiner. On the contrary, I feel that it was courageous for Didion to reveal herself this way and that the awareness of the narrator as a fragile, flawed individual rather than an omnipotent, god-like commentator pronouncing judgement on its subjects gives a unity and a perspective to these disparate pieces that they would not have possessed otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: Superficial.
Review: Only two articles were worth-while reading: one about Doris Lessing and the other about Hollywood. The others were totally unimportant.
The author doesn't play in the same league as, for instance, a Simon Leys (about China) or an Ian Buruma (about Japan).
Rating:
Summary: Didion reports on Californian superficiality
Review: The first thing that I noticed about this book was it's title, The White Album. This, of course, is also the name of one of the greatest Beatles albums, but the book, except for a brief discussion of the Manson Family murders, really does not mention the Beatles. Didion was merely using symbolism, a tool often employed throughout the book. The White Album, by the Beatles, was one of the first albums in which their separating musical ideas began to shine through, and yet it all sticks beautifully together. Didion used this to try to say the same thing about her own life. This first essay, however, the essay that bares the name, The White Album, is, in many ways, much different than the other essays in this collection. Many of the other essays deal with the superficiality of the Californian lifestyle. Some prime examples are in the essay "Many Mansions," in which Didion describes a govenors mansion built by the Reagan's that cost CA $1.4 million dollars, but sat empty. Another example is in "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik," in which Didion describes a young woman who has moved to LA with the belief that she will become famous. This is not uncommon in LA, unfortunatly, it is also uncommon for those hopeful's to make it. Didion seems to feel awfully sorry for this girl. Basically, Didion seems to think that LA is a great town, but it's not for everyone, and that the myths that were made about really are, for the most part, myths. This really is a great book, especially for anyone interesting in the Sixties and Seventies, or for anyone who is even remotely considering moving to LA. You'll get a good picture of the town, and even some of its history with this book.
Rating:
Summary: Many mornings after the 60s
Review: The White Album was published in 1979, and most of the material here is from the 1970s. Even so, the book is at least as much about the 1960s as is Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Like that book, this is a collection of essays from various publications, plus some previously unpublished material. It's a mixed bag. The title piece is quite strong, as is "On The Morning After The Sixties," proving, perhaps, that the 1960s really were Didion's one true subject. There's other good stuff here, too, and the book is actually sort of underrated, since so many observers rate it a poor second to Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But the Didion style is actually quite strong in this volume, sharply observed, carefully written, personal without being confessional, and always flirting with detachment but not quite achieving it. Obviously some people just can't stand Didion's essays, and this book would hardly change their mind; but if you're open to her style, this is worth reading.
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