We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman’s Library)
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman’s Library) (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Joan Didion’s incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.
Customer Review: A Keen Eye, A Beautiful Voice
I seldom read non-fiction, due to habit and training, mostly. However, when I read essays like these, I am as amazed and inspired as I would be by any great piece of fiction. Joan Didion’s voice is clear, her eye sharp. This collection gathers essays from the 60’s (a time I remember very well)up to and including the Bush Administration (a time I’d just as soon forget)and manages to combine history, social commentary and personality profiles into keen observations not only about the world at large, but also about herself as a part of that world. She moves from Las Vegas (I love her take on that place!) to California to Miami to El Salvador. All the while, as I read I stand in amazement at the way she writes. In his intro to the book, John Leonard says her “black album” is the “habitation of a brave heart and a radiant intellect, an ice palace and a greenhouse. . . to instruct us and the sentences we can almost sing.” Certainly said better than I could have. If you can appreciate journalism as literature, you will no doubt enjoy these essays.
Customer Review: Divinity between the covers
WARNING! This is an extremely biassed review!
No one writes like Joan Didion. Every story, almost every sentence is a study of someone who obviously loves the language.
Didion hones in on our finest feelings, our fears, our sorrows shot from her literary arrow, with the truest aim.
I cannot read Didion without wanting to know more…there is something in her non-fiction pieces which reaches out and grabs you, drawing you into facts that would send you to sleep if it were someone else offering them to you.
This is a fine collection of Didion observations. No one does it better. I am still resonanting to Self Esteem from Slouching Toward Bethlehem and I read it 10 years ago. Where I Was From is full of California stories, and even if you’ve never even visited the place you would know it intimately when you finish the book.
A great collection.
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