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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG…
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics) (original 1968; edition 2008)

by Joan Didion (Author)

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4,119862,871 (4.1)144
Old school but really refreshing, intelligent but not dry, witty but not smug. Surprisingly still relevant today. Interesting to read and work out where she was in relation to the events and places she writes about. A kind of friendly impartiality coupled with an incisive perception.

It’s easy to see how she influenced both men and women of her time and later. You will not regret reading Joan Didion ( )
1 vote Ken-Me-Old-Mate | Sep 24, 2020 |
Showing 1-25 of 86 (next | show all)
The essay about migraines was kind of amazing. ( )
  caedocyon | Mar 11, 2024 |
Summary: A collection of essays, most originally published as Saturday Evening Post articles describing Didion’s first years back in California, during the height of the hippie movement.

I never read Joan Didion’s work while she was alive. Only in recent years have I developed a taste for essays, and as I read essayists, Didion’s name comes up repeatedly as a master of the craft. This work is her first non-fiction (she published a novel, Run, River, in 1963). This set of essays, most of which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, were mostly written between 1964-1967. These were her first years back in her home state of California after eight years of working for Vogue in New York City, to which she eventually returned.

The essays capture the ethos of California in the mid-1960s, the mix of sunny optimism, the agricultural belt of the Sacramento Valley, where she grew up, the nervous lassitude of Los Angeles when the Santa Ana winds rise, and the outlaw fighter John Wayne after he “licked the Big C” the outlaw cells that had threatened his life when she was on set covering the making of The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s 165th film. In stark contrast, she profiles Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She describes Baez as “a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Her title essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, recounts her time in 1967 in Haight-Asbury during the “summer of love” where youth from all over the country flocked to San Francisco signaling an unraveling in the social fabric of the country, an inchoate longing. She describes the people she met, the flophouses like The Warehouse they lived, the prodigious use of drugs, and the do-gooders like Arthur Lisch with utopian visions who ended up caring for kids when they crashed, and the Zen alternatives to trips. Already, the demise of Haight was apparent to some.

“Personals,” the second section collects articles with a more interior focus: her notebook keeping, thoughts on morality and self-respect (“Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”). She reminds us of 1960’s monster movies and what is like to go home when it is no longer home.

The final part, “Seven Places of the Mind” take us from Hawaii to Alcatraz to Newport and to her eight years in New York. The essay on Newport, “The Seacoast of Despair” gave voice to my own experience of the lavish mansions of a bygone age, sterile and sad. In New York, she describes the point at which she stopped believing in “new faces” and felt herself becoming increasingly estranged from the whole scene, rescued by her husband who took a six-month leave that turned into a long-term residence in California.

There is so much of interest here. Didion masterfully crafts sentences and tells non-fiction stories. She is a keen observer of herself, the places where she visits or lives, and the times through which she was living. Whether profiling the famous or the unknown, like Comrade Laski of the Communist Party of the United States of America, she opens our eyes to both their individuality and the ways they serve larger than life roles as types.

Some of us are at a point of reflecting back over our lives, and summing up what they’ve meant. These essays were a lens to consider at least a part of that life. I’m intrigued enough to read more of her insights on the times we have both traversed and how she made sense of them. It strikes me that we had so many dreams of changing the world and indeed, the world has changed, but not as we expected. I wonder if Didion was as surprised and unsettled as I find myself in looking at the the world sixty years later. Or did she indeed foresee the center that cannot hold and the beast slouching toward Bethlehem? ( )
  BobonBooks | Mar 7, 2024 |
My own failing but there were times in some of these pieces that I had no idea what Joan Didion was writing about. The writing is so reliant on American popular cultural references that with the passage of time they have become opaque to non-American readers. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Joan Didion's insights, feistiness and her turn of phrase. This collection is a book I could and should re-read because there is treasure to be found and some of the pieces set me off into deep reflections on how to live. Perhaps the most memorable for me (because I read it yesterday) was in Seven Place of the Mind: The Seacoast of Despair. When the hopes and dreams of a mercantile culture come to fruition:

Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadows of migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children?
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  simonpockley | Feb 25, 2024 |
The essay about migraines was kind of amazing. ( )
  caedocyon | Feb 23, 2024 |
first published in 1968
  betty_s | Sep 18, 2023 |
I do not judge the author but give the two stars only to reflect that I did not like this book; others do. I like reading about her and hope to find books she wrote that I will like. ( )
  RickGeissal | Aug 16, 2023 |
I get the hype now. I loved her writing in this whole book. Awesome. ( )
  beckyrenner | Aug 3, 2023 |
I really enjoyed one essay and a couple of others were ok. Very time capsule-like and I suppose I should care about Sacramento, John Wayne, Newport, and NYC 50 years ago, but I don't. ( )
  Mcdede | Jul 19, 2023 |
4.8/5 ( )
  jarrettbrown | Jul 4, 2023 |
Didion always had such an eloquent way with words and imagery. And if you have ever lived for a good length of time in California, especially Southern California, you will inevitably encounter a story written about an incident from an area you are familiar with, even in a place as obscure as the western end of San Bernardino County. ( )
  LeeFisher | Jun 3, 2023 |
Series of essays mostly set in California. I felt it useful to look at a map as I was reading this book. The most interesting chapter was the book's namesake - about teenage runaways and the narcotic problem in San Francisco in the 1960s, Joan working as a journalist in her 30s.
Brief summary of the chapters:
: Lucille Millar convicted murderer of husband
: John Wayne (Marion Morrison) "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" (The closest citation is in John Steinbeck's grapes of wrath "a man got to do what he got to do")
: Joan Baez institute for the study of non-violence with Ira Sandperl
: Howard Hughes, asocial
: center for the study of democratic institutions, intellectual community discus current affairs and influences improve the national and international weal.
: communist party of United states of America, workers international bookstore in Watts
: Las Vegas wedding industry
: San Francisco Haite district narcotics, Haight Street - teenage runaways ignorant of society, "able only to feed-back...self-doubts, Vietnam, saran-wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.", the Diggers
: Musings of keeping notes, how they bring memories both true and false
: importance of self-respect
: Essays on the impact of Hollywood restrictions film industry
: Morality and gossip
: Differences between childhood home, and adult homes
: What is the true California
: Hawaii graveyard, impact of war
: Alcatraz island visiting the ruins
: visiting the fin-de-siecle cottages at Newport
: holiday in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico
: Santa Ana, a Foehn wind and it's effects
: living in New York, missing California ( )
  AChild | May 30, 2023 |
This book is okay, some pieces more than that, some less, but I certainly didn’t encounter the shimmering revelation it’s reputed to be. In a couple places it bordered on approaching its reputation. But only a couple. And by the end (of a short book) I was tired of her somewhat affected style and her grasping for something to write about, rather than writing because she really had something of value to say that really merited being communicated to others. As opposed, for example, to Leo Strauss in his The City and Man. (I read the two books at the same time so I can’t help comparing them, as odd as that might be.)

I guess this is what journalists do, but a good journalist isn’t a Montaigne just because she’s considerably better than the low average. Yes, it’s rather interesting that she was in but not of the 60s generation, and that her critique could be labeled “conservative” while no one adopting that label would ever adopt her. Moderately interesting, like her writing and her insights. Nothing more.
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  garbagedump | Dec 9, 2022 |
I am honestly shocked by the rhapsodizing I've heard concerning her over the years. But I guess I shouldn't be. This smug sophisticate is precisely placed to give the establishment what it wants. It's very sly the way Didion guilelessly slouches through each scene, pulling out rugs, trying to spotlight ironies. She's the high-society poet of ennui, the vanquisher of unstylish rebels.

Viewed through the lens of her privileged bubble, challengers of the establishment, those rabble-rousing political types, are simple grotesques, naive child harbingers of chaos. This is because the ravages of inequality, injustice, state violence are faraway abstractions for her, unpleasantries to ruin a cocktail party (where she might show up just to look waifish, hide and judge people). Her heroes are figureheads of the capitalist fantasy machine like swaggering John "The Duke" Wayne and mega-rich playboy Hughes.

I finally had to stop after her nauseating ode to those 'self-loving' pioneers of the American frontier. You know the ones who swarmed the continent like locusts so we can have shopping malls instead of forests. Genocide can be wholesome fun as long as the victims are brown. Whoop-dee-doo for self-love. Her only previous mention of anyone of color is her painfully awkward and derisive depiction of a few faceless "negroes" in a crowd.

Does Didion deliver an insight or clever bon mot here or there? Hell, she spends every moment of her (stilted/shoe-gazing/chain-smoking/coke-swilling) life racing to jot down her every thought. She's bound to kick over a shiny pebble or two. But always she holds herself at a safe distance from life, never fathoming it in its essence. ( )
  PipRosi | Oct 21, 2022 |
The first essays are great, but the last ones only so-so. ( )
  breic | May 29, 2022 |
I've awarded five stars to Joan Didion's remarkable Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, a very rare rating from me for any work of nonfiction. I probably can't add anything to the acreage of praise her work has garnered through the years, latecomer that I am to this author's work. So instead I'll try to say how it makes me feel.

One thing I love about good writing in any genre is that I feel as though I were trying on somebody else's head. The view from Didion's head has crisp, bright edges and an underside of unsparing vulnerability. She has a way of turning--turning not magically but gyroscopically--keen observation into still meditation. I feel that I'm experiencing a crystalline vision of whatever she sees, in all its rounded and jagged reality, and also the echo of pain in the tender being of the observer.

And yet she never fully exposes her mind and its secrets. Instead she steers us toward our own, bringing clarity as well as deeper questions.

In this volume, images of the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere are served with a quality of moving air that makes me feel that I am breathing in these scenes as the author experiences them. In the title essay in particular, the poignancy of her depiction of the Haight in the summer of 1967 is almost too vivid for my sensory imagination. I wasn't there. I was in Boston that summer, Boston's own summer of love. A summer that bridged the nation.

I've already read and drunk in The Year of Magical Thinking, which helped me greatly in my first months of widowhood. I'll be seeking out the rest of her work. ( )
1 vote Meredy | Apr 30, 2022 |
This is a collection of Joan Didions writing first collected in 1968. There are pieces written about celebrities, about herself, about America and the fantastic eponymous essay about the San Fransciso counter culture. There's a good range of stuff in here, and although some of the topics are a little dated the writing still feels fresh and precise. ( )
  AlisonSakai | Apr 29, 2022 |
After a viewing of Griffin Dunne's 2017 documentary, The Center will not Hold, I finally picked up Didion's debut work. As a cultural history of a singularly tumultuous time, the book is invaluable. But its real value is in the light it shines on the quickening of a great woman of letters, of a voice that would always be of its time yet still manage to detail the deep and lasting effects of mundane horror. Whether commenting on the ethics of self-respect or morality, or documenting the hippie culture in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury, Didion pulls the veil back in ways most authors would shudder at, exposing herself, and us, in every line. it's an evocative, and self-exorcising, read, and evidence of a truly unique intellect.

Highly recommended.
5 bones!!!! ( )
2 vote blackdogbooks | Mar 6, 2022 |
(review soon--Wow.) ( )
  jstruzzi | Jan 14, 2022 |
(review soon--Wow.) ( )
  jstruzzi | Jan 14, 2022 |
I think Didion may be a great writer not because she is a great stylist or a great storyteller – though those are both true – but because I found her voice so easy to relate to. Especially in her personal essays – the last third or so of the book – she writes from the verge of self-discovery, as a humanist in the midst of the attempt to untangle her own humanism, and she reflected on her life and on its circumstantial culture with such very effective, polished, yet emphatic writing that I couldn’t help but feel inspired by her talent and youth.

The New York essay in the end especially touched me – it’s a dream to go to New York and “make it there,” because then I’d know “I could make it anywhere” – and Didion hits that Big Apple chestnut so hard when she writes about how she didn’t want to tell her parents about her inability to afford groceries because then she wouldn’t have been able to know whether or not she could’ve made it on her own. And it’s that kind of youthful independence that resonated most with me here, and which enabled Didion to conduct such a deep analysis of all the different things she analyzed in her essays. She incises into the thought processes behind the cultures of specific settings, and I tended to not only to agree with but also feel transported to the cities and towns and places she described.

That’s not to say that I will remember all of them. I won’t. Sifting through the riverbed of her writing would not get you too many golden nuggets, and the turns of phrase that really struck out to me were more related to the way her personality shone through them. I slogged through some of the essays in the beginning, which were not as substantial as her personal ones, I felt. My favorite ones were the first one (with the L.A. car accident / murder / affairs), Slouching . . . some other ones. I don’t really remember.
( )
1 vote Gadi_Cohen | Sep 22, 2021 |
Interesting read, I enjoyed the writing, but I felt the book needed something to pull it together. ( )
  KittyCatrinCat | Aug 29, 2021 |
I listened to this on Audible. The narrator, Diane Keaton was an inspired choice. Loved this!@ ( )
  scoene | Jul 13, 2021 |
Your Mom Goes To A Rock Concert
Joan Didion was 32 years old during the Summer of Love - 1967 San Francisco, the general time frame of this collection of pop culture essays. To give the reader of this review context, I in contrast was twelve. Though I cannot claim to have visited the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco during that summer, I certainly idealized and idolized the rock bands who played at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival held in June of that summer outside the city. To a young teen living in a small town in the Midwest, the message to abandon the stifling constraints of post-World War II America, to reject the claimed necessity of the Vietnam War, to throw out the prejudice and discrimination rampant in the country at the time, was extremely powerful. In my view, that message lit a spark that led America to abandon the costly and senseless war, and led Americans to begin to open up a little bit more to gender and racial equality. In these dark times, the final days of COVID-19, shortly after the insurrection in Washington of January 6, 2021, and in the midst of a reckoning triggered by police violence against African Americans, that summer seems like a moment of light.
Well, Joan Didion is here to tell you she actually was in San Francisco that summer, checked out the dirty kids, and there's 'nothing here worth seeing, just move along'. The book's title, also used for the centerpiece essay on 1967 San Francisco, refers to the poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, and it tells you that Ms. Didion sees the dirty kids as harbingers of the decline and fall of Western Culture:
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Other essays about modern times in California project a similarly fatalistic atmosphere: a suburban housewife murders her husband ("A lot of girls live here, a lot of girls who somehow misunderstood the promise"), Joan Baez is squirreled away in a schoolhouse ("She had only a small repertory of Child ballads..., never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists...."), a guy is paid to do nothing by Howard Hughes, and a central film expressing the angst of Cuban Missile Crisis America, Dr. Strangelove "was essentially a one-line gag."
Aw mom, you just don't get it. ( )
  TH_Shunk | Jul 6, 2021 |
Didion writes for herself, stitching together errant observations of people and the cultural milieu in 1960s California. While this slice of time and space is not particularly interesting to me, I love how confidently Didion writes, pretty much like a man that takes for granted that his words will be considered interesting by others. I felt low-key anxious reading her essays, though, suffocated by the performative behavior, unhappiness, and lack of self awareness among the people she describes.

( )
  jiyoungh | May 3, 2021 |
“...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. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

I loved these essays. I could go on quoting Didion on and on, there are just too many great passages, great insights from her.

The truth is that I am full of envy. I envy Joan Didion’s facility with words. In a vernacular that is erudite without being stuffy, poetic without being overly romantic, extremely precise and sharp, she distill her thoughts skilfully.

I actually listen to it in audio format, and I know I am going to listen to one or another essay when I need something short to amuse me. But I am also going to buy the book because I want to highlight some passages, and because I want to give my own cadence to her voice. Diane Keaton narrated the version I listened and I did enjoy her voice. She sounded youthful, and made Didion’s monologues less cultured or intellectual than I perceive Didion to be. Which, surprisingly, I felt worked well. It gave Didion’s thoughts a new layer, more accessible and amicable.

This collection is said to capture the essence of 1960’s America, and I think it does. We have John Wayne, Joan Baez, San Francisco and hippies… yet, the personal essays will stay with me longer: self-respect, immorality and the power of going home are obviously more material to me than historical commentary on America.

I don’t know what I will read next, because it will be such a letdown after this book. I feel I am coming down from a high, and right now all I wanted is more of Didion’s words. Like a junkie I may just start from the beginning again. Someone please help me!


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1 vote RosanaDR | Apr 15, 2021 |
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