In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own "bad dreams" with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960s counterculture.
From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the "giddily splendid" Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus's footsteps-and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls- "toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes"-and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women's movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders-a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one.
Written in "a voice like no other in contemporary journalism," The White Album is a masterpiece of literary reportage and a fearless work of autobiography by the National Book Award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking ( The New York Times Book Review). Its power to electrify and inform remains undiminished nearly forty years after it was first published.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live. THE WHITE ALBUM
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(@OpenRoadMedia, 9 May 2017, ebook, 222 pages, borrowed from @AmazonKindle, #PrimeReading)
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I enjoyed Slouching Toward Bethlehem so looked forward to reading The White Album, another collection of essays. I've never read her fiction. Maybe I should? I really enjoyed the essays collected here. They were written and set in the 60's and 70's and offer a fascinating insight into that era. There's something I find appealing about Didion's cool detachment and how she can turn every observation into something profound and deeply personal.
