Joan Didion's Books

Where I Was From

A Memoir

By: Joan Didion

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From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

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Page Count

241

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307763293

ISBN 13

9780307763297

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

By: Joan Didion

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Let Me Tell You What I Mean

By: Joan Didion

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection that reveals what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. "Didion’s remarkable, five decades-long career as a journalist, essayist, novelist, and screen writer has earned her a prominent place in the American literary canon, and the twelve early pieces collected here underscore her singularity."—O Magazine With a forward by Hilton Als, these pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time" (The New York Times Book Review). Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write," Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men," these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593312198

ISBN 13

9780593312193

Joan Didion: What She Means

By: Joan Didion

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Joan Didion: What She Means

By: Joan Didion

An exploration of the visual corollary to Didion's life and work and the feeling that each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics--including artists from Helen Lundeberg to Diane Arbus, Betye Saar to Maren Hassinger, Vija Celmins and Andy Warhol In Joan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics. Arranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. (Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971's The Panic in Needle Parkand 1976's A Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five. The book includes 50 artists ranging from Brice Marden and Ed Ruscha to Betye Saar, Vija Clemins and many others, with works in all mediums including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video and film. Also included are three previously uncollected texts by Didion: "In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love" (1969); a much-excerpted 1975 commencement address at UC Riverside; and "The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic" (2007).

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120

Publisher

Delmonico Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1636810578

ISBN 13

9781636810577

The White Album

Essays

By: Joan Didion

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The White Album

Essays

By: Joan Didion

First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

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188

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374608792

ISBN 13

9780374608798

The Year of Magical Thinking

A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir

By: Joan Didion

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The Year of Magical Thinking

A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir

By: Joan Didion

In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir, Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play. “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you....” Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called the memoir that was the basis for the play, “an indelible portrait of loss and grief ... a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage." The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307386414

ISBN 13

9780307386410

The Year of Magical Thinking

A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir

By: Joan Didion

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The Year of Magical Thinking

A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir

By: Joan Didion

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307498913

ISBN 13

9780307498915

Blue Nights

By: Joan Didion

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Blue Nights

By: Joan Didion

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound.

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Page Count

210

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307387380

ISBN 13

9780307387387

South and West

From a Notebook

By: Joan Didion

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South and West

From a Notebook

By: Joan Didion

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.

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162

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525434194

ISBN 13

9780525434191

Fixed Ideas

America Since 9.11

By: Joan Didion

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Fixed Ideas

America Since 9.11

By: Joan Didion

Novelist and essayist Joan Didion writes about the refusal of Americans to openly discuss and debate the Bush administration's new unilateralism toward both domestic and international policies since 9/11. This provocative and persuasive essay was originally published in The New York Review of Books, and garnered a tremendous response from the magazine's readers. In a preface commissioned for this book edition, Frank Rich, the popular op-ed columnist for The New York Times, echoes her argument with his own passionate analysis. Fixed Ideas is an incisive, timely political commentary from an American virtuoso.

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New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590170733

ISBN 13

9781590170731

The Last Thing He Wanted

By: Joan Didion

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The Last Thing He Wanted

By: Joan Didion

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Didion at her finest" —USA Today • An intricate, fast-paced novel about trying to create a context for democracy and getting hands a little dirty in the process, complete with conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations. From the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean The narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. She finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father. She becomes embroiled in her his business even though "she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined. Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points out how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly.

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241

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307787338

ISBN 13

9780307787330

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

By: Joan Didion

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

By: Joan Didion

Classic literary journalism which defined, for many, the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution "It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not..." "So physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate" that people tended to forget that her presence ran counter to their best interests, Joan Didion slipped herself into the heart of the Sixties Revolution, only to slip out again with this savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during those curious days. Now that some of the posturing and pronouncements of those times are being recycled, Didion's sobering reflections are timely once again: 'the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

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256

Publisher

Fourth Estate

Published Date

ISBN 10

0008284644

ISBN 13

9780008284640

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Essays

By: Joan Didion

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Essays

By: Joan Didion

Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.” More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and 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. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] 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.”

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158

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374608784

ISBN 13

9780374608781

A Book of Common Prayer

By: Joan Didion

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A Book of Common Prayer

By: Joan Didion

A shimmering novel of innocence and evil: the gripping story of two American women in a failing Central American nation, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean "[Didion's] most ambitious project in fiction, and her most successful ... glows with a golden aura of well-wrought classical tragedy.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of Boca Grande's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," Charlotte has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence. A Book of Common Prayer is written with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made Didion one of our most distinguished journalists.

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Page Count

277

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307787591

ISBN 13

9780307787590

Democracy

By: Joan Didion

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Democracy

By: Joan Didion

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean—a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life. Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase. Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam. As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class.

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243

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307787370

ISBN 13

9780307787378

Miami

By: Joan Didion

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Miami

By: Joan Didion

An astonishing account of Cuban exiles, CIA informants, and cocaine traffickers in Florida by the New York Times–bestselling author of South and West. In Miami, the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking looks beyond postcard images of fluorescent waters, backlit islands, and pastel architecture to explore the murkier waters of a city on the edge. From Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination to Oliver North and the Iran–Contra affair, Joan Didion uncovers political intrigues and shadowy underworld connections, and documents the US government’s “seduction and betrayal” of the Cuban exile community in Dade County. She writes of hotels that offer “guerrilla discounts,” gun shops that advertise Father’s Day deals, and a real-estate market where “Unusual Security and Ready Access to the Ocean” are perks for wealthy homeowners looking to make a quick escape. With a booming drug trade, staggering racial and class inequities, and skyrocketing murder rates, Miami in the 1980s felt more like a Third World capital than a modern American city. Didion describes the violence, passion, and paranoia of these troubled times in arresting detail and “beautifully evocative prose” (The New York Times Book Review). A vital report on an immigrant community traumatized by broken dreams and the cynicism of US foreign policy, Miami is a masterwork of literary journalism whose insights are timelier and more important than ever.

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166

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1504045688

ISBN 13

9781504045681

Run River

By: Joan Didion

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Run River

By: Joan Didion

The iconic writer's electrifying first novel is a story of marriage, murder and betrayal that only she could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense—from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience—a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California.

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279

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307787753

ISBN 13

9780307787750

Salvador

By: Joan Didion

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Salvador

By: Joan Didion

Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. Didion "brings the country to life" (The New York Times), delivering an anatomy of a particular brand of political terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, Didion interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear." Here, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

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Page Count

115

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679751831

ISBN 13

9780679751830

Vintage Didion

By: Joan Didion

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Vintage Didion

By: Joan Didion

The perfect introduction to one of our greatest modern writers: Joan Didion "has the instincts of an exceptional reporter and the focus of a historian, [with] a novelist’s appreciation of the surreal" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Whether she’s writing about civil war in Central America, political scurrility in Washington, or the tightly-braided myths and realities of her native California, Joan Didion expresses an unblinking vision of the truth. Vintage Didion includes three chapters from Miami; an excerpt from Salvador; and three separate essays from After Henry that cover topics from Ronald Reagan to the Central Park jogger case. Also included is “Clinton Agonistes” from Political Fictions, and “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History,” a scathing analysis of the ongoing war on terror.

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184

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307548759

ISBN 13

9780307548757

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Collected Nonfiction; Introduction by John Leonard

By: Joan Didion

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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Collected Nonfiction; Introduction by John Leonard

By: Joan Didion

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, this collection includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From. As featured in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. 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.

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1162

Publisher

Everyman's Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307264874

ISBN 13

9780307264879

Political Fictions

By: Joan Didion

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Political Fictions

By: Joan Didion

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In these coolly observant essays, the iconic bestselling writer looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

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Page Count

354

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0375718907

ISBN 13

9780375718908

Play it as it Lays

By: Joan Didion

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Play it as it Lays

By: Joan Didion

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer.

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174

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007414994

ISBN 13

9780007414994

Insider Baseball

from Political Fictions

By: Joan Didion

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Insider Baseball

from Political Fictions

By: Joan Didion

A Vintage Shorts Selection • Almost three decades ago, iconic and incomparable American essayist Joan Didion’s now-classic report from the Dukakis campaign trail exposed, in no uncertain terms, the complete sham that is the modern American presidential run. Writing with bite and some humor too, Didion betrays “the process”—the way in which power is exchanged and the status quo is maintained. All insiders—politicians, journalists, spin doctors—participate in a political narrative that is “designed as it is to maintain the illusion of consensus by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues.” The optics of presidential campaigns have grown ever more farcical and remote from the needs and issues most relevant to Americans’ lives, and Didion’s elegant, shrewd, and prescient commentary has never been more urgent than it is right now. An ebook short.

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525433821

ISBN 13

9780525433828

Where I Was From

By: Joan Didion

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Where I Was From

By: Joan Didion

A memoir of the history of a family and the history of a country from one of the most renowned American writers of the century. In this book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her own history and America's. The memoir, in Didion's words, represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely. frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today - a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. She shows California's startling contradictions in its - and in America's - core values and her unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories make this a provocative tour de force.

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Page Count

226

Publisher

Fourth Estate

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007179294

ISBN 13

9780007179299

Vintage Didion

By: Joan Didion

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Vintage Didion

By: Joan Didion

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184

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307548759

ISBN 13

9780307548757

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

By: Joan Didion

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Let Me Tell You What I Mean

By: Joan Didion

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time" (The New York Times Book Review). Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write," Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men," these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

059331848X

ISBN 13

9780593318485

South and West

From a Notebook

By: Joan Didion

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South and West

From a Notebook

By: Joan Didion

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Page Count

162

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525434194

ISBN 13

9780525434191

Where I Was From

By: Joan Didion

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Where I Was From

By: Joan Didion

In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Where I Was From, in Didion’s words, “represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.” The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. In Where I Was From, Didion turns what John Leonard has called “her sonar ear, her radar eye” onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today–a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its–and in America’s–core values. Joan Didion’s unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of our greatest writers. From the Hardcover edition.

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Page Count

241

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307787958

ISBN 13

9780307787958

Book's by Joan Didion

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