Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays: Didion, Joan: 9780374531386: Books - Amazon.ca

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Paperback – Oct. 28 2008

by Joan Didion (Author)

4.4 4,868 ratings

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The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America― particularly California―in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

Oct. 28 2008
Dimensions

13.84 x 1.65 x 20.83 cm
ISBN-10

0374531382
ISBN-13

978-0374531386
Lexile measure

1270L
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
Highlighted by 2,659 Kindle readers
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
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Product description

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

From the Back Cover

Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction.
"In her portraits of people," "The New York Times Book Review wrote, "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 rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country."
In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand--the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion--but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.
Joyce Carol Oates has written, "Joan Didion is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever. . . . She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (Oct. 28 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374531382
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374531386
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 kg
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.84 x 1.65 x 20.83 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #11,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #33 in Literary Essays (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 4,868 ratings

About the author

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Joan Didion

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Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.

For more information, visit www.joandidion.org

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

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Top reviews from Canada

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Amazon Customer

What a writer !

Reviewed in Canada on August 27, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book was delivered two hours ago and I immediately started reading it.
I prefer fiction however I am enjoying this book, what a great writer. I recommend.

Amazon Customer

Joan Didion was amazing as usual and never failed to impress with her ...

Reviewed in Canada on September 5, 2016

The book arrived well within the suggested time. Joan Didion was amazing as usual and never failed to impress with her ability to portray such an iconic era through the profiles of different individuals as well as herself.

Patterson Webster

Essays worth reading

Reviewed in Canada on April 27, 2022

Verified Purchase

Joan Didion's writing is as good now as it was in the 1960s when she wrote these essays. Perceptive, personal and persuasive. A very good read.

One person found this helpful

M. Catherine Knox

Joan Didion essays

Reviewed in Canada on September 9, 2021

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Love Didion’s writing and her observations and impressions of the ‘60’s!

Bridgett Sutherland

Trip to the past

Reviewed in Canada on October 30, 2023

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Well worth the read of what it was like in the 50’s and 60’s in bothe the east and west coasts. A visit to nostalgia to a time unlike the present

Joan Didion’s work still relevant

Reviewed in Canada on December 20, 2017

Verified Purchase

Joan Didion’s work is as relevant today as was when she wrote it. She writes in her own unique and original voice, which completely engages me and I find captivating. I enjoy the history of the 1950s and 60s, as she saw and experienced them, and then retold in her own literary journalistic style. A great read for anyone.

2 people found this helpful

American Anomie

Reviewed in Canada on October 31, 2001

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.

Reviewed in Canada on March 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Astonishing in it clarity, and made so much more sense to me now 47 years later. Its made me realize how childish i was when i first read it, so i am glad to be given a second chance.

One person found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

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Katharina Bienz

As advertised ,

Reviewed in Mexico on February 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

As advertised, came 1 day after order was placed

André

joan didion gigante

Reviewed in Brazil on February 15, 2022

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baita livrão!!! não deem drog@s pras criança galera

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2 people found this helpful

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TS

Enjoyable book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2023

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Enjoying this book it is a selection of various different subjects writings from the writer. If you are interested in American history or just fancy a good interesting read this is a good book for you.

Carey Calvert

... always selling somebody out.

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2021

Verified Purchase

Once I read The Year of Magical Thinking, I made it my goal to read all of Didion’s books; this in preparation or rather leading up to her latest endeavor, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, which features twelve never before collected pieces, that “offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.”

It is scheduled to be released January 26th.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a beautifully written exploration of the self, enveloped in grief.

While doing research for her latest, I googled her page and found a Vanity Fair article from 2016, “How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend.” In The Atlantic, a post from 2015, “The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion,” and finally, from the Inquirer. Net, a post from yesterday, January 15, “What did Joan Didion smell like in her 20s?”

Of course I clicked on it.

It led me to the last chapter in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “Goodbye to All That,” her instinctive yet enthralling ode to New York. “For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published in 1968 and both are still available; the former launched in 1933, the latter, 1948.

The title comes from the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, and “conveys the complexity and the ‘atomization’ of the hippie scene not as the latest fashionable fad, but as a serious advanced stage of society in which things are truly “falling apart.””

Didion is always relevant.

I didn’t know Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion’s first collection of non-fiction writing; at the time there were questions whether this type of writing was acceptable other than “mere journalism,” but in reality, it is a “rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”

In Dan Wakefield’s review from the New York Times at the time of its publication, “… in her portraits of people, Ms. Didion is not out to expose but to understand and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed bridges and naïve acid trippers, left wing idealogues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamourous but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful in the midst of their lives’ debris.”

Divided into 3 sections, Lifestyles in the Golden Land, Personals, and Seven Places of the Mind; it doesn’t matter what she writes, her personality comes through in such a self-effacing way, as if speaking with a friend. Her prose can meander without losing the reader, then lead you right to a Kleenex.

And you don’t know how you got there.

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

38 people found this helpful

Pastafactory

Fabuleux

Reviewed in France on March 13, 2022

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Une des plus grandes autrices du XXème siècle. Peut-être son recueil le plus connu, malheureusement pas intégralement traduit en français.

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