Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
by Joan Didion
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joan DidionEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-28
ISBN: 0374531382
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Book Review: GREAT COLLECTION FOR ANYONE -- RECOMMENDED BY COLLEGE PROFESSOR (FOR HERSELF AND HER STUDENTS)
Summary: 5 Stars
I am reminded how important it is -- necessary, curative -- to have my own beliefs and opinions disrupted by this book. I love this book all over again, so much, that I am assigning this book to students in a critical thinking class at my college. I have used it successfully in the past, and have learned that contemporary readers have no trouble dealing with Didion's historical references. Historical references, I said with my jaw-dropped the first time a student complained about this. My thinking was that Didion is contemporary. And she is -- just read her. For an 18 year old born in 1991, the unrest of 1968 seems as long ago as the Civil War. To my colleagues, stop scolding students for using the internet. Bring it into any book discussion. In a "smart classroom," equipped with an online computer and a projection screen, I hot link any of Didion's lessor known references to the voices and people she mentions, captured by hand-held cameras and recording devices 41 years ago, uploaded more recently by cathode ray addicted teenagers onto their online social networks. Whew. Young readers are natural researchers; they spend most of their free time connecting bits of information. They are bored easily, too. That's why Didion is really great. She is as fresh and demanding and observant and as thankfully disruptive as they aim to be by pointing their cell phone cameras at the world, hitting click, then send. They like her for her daring and even more for her restraint -- something that few writers know how to use. I have to thank writer Tom Carson for his reminder of just how good Didion is -- and how current she is -- in his "Los Angeles Magazine" review of Evan Wright's book of essays, Hella Nation Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's WarAgainst the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America. I don't know if Amazon lets reviewers link to outside content, but I hope the company will allow me to credit my source. Tom Carson's essay is very good:
[...]
Carson's review makes me want to buy the books he mentions in hand or by the "kindle," a term that anyone who likes Didion has already worried to death. Carson puts Evan Wright's "Hella Nation" on the same shelf with Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Generally, I am disappointed by anyone saying that a new writer comes close to Didion. I am ridiculously angry, but not so this time. Evan Wright's account of our invasion of Iraq Generation Kill was outstanding, but for some reason I did not know his work as an essayist until I bought Hella Nation for medicinal reasons -- as an antidote to my television news addiction that occurred during the G20 Summit. The photograph on the cover reminded me of the G20 protesters in London who were being "kettled," almost as bad sounding as the term as "kindled," by the British police. Surely, Wright must have schooled himself on Didion. There is in my mind a mother - son bond between them. I am in no way a lurker at book signings, although I do attend them (politely, front row, nervous but prepared with a good question), but I do feel a visceral connection to writers' works. I organize "my writers" into a kind of family tree from which I remarkably descend, and rise out of myself. In short, I'm just another crazy fan. Truly, if I could had never read "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," I would be cheated from experiencing something magical in my otherwise dreary fate. Life without Didion would be like Jane Eyre NOT returning to Thornfield. What's next for this Didion freak? What else? I am going to read the other book Tom Carson places on his shelf with Didion (and Wright): Tony Horwitz' "Confederates in the Attic" Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Any other suggestions?
Summary of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
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.
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