Point Books Concering Slouching Towards Bethlehem
| Original Title: | Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays |
| ISBN: | 0374521727 (ISBN13: 9780374521721) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Joan Didion
Paperback | Pages: 238 pages Rating: 4.21 | 33705 Users | 2588 Reviews
Itemize Epithetical Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
| Title | : | Slouching Towards Bethlehem |
| Author | : | Joan Didion |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 238 pages |
| Published | : | October 1st 1990 by Farrar Straus Giroux (first published 1968) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. Autobiography. Memoir. History. Classics. Short Stories |
Narrative During Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book. I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values. Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write, clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drug, sex, and rock-n-roll. I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper. This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism—here is a writer, a woman, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Or unafraid to admit a lifelong crush on the manufactured, wooden John Wayne, a caricature of the American man. Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."Oh, don't we all?
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Ratings: 4.21 From 33705 Users | 2588 ReviewsDiscuss Epithetical Books Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" becomeHow can one possibly not love Joan Didion be it for her fiction or non-fiction. These twenty essays demonstrate her skills not only as a journalist but also as an incredible author. I must confess the essay on Howard Hughes scintillated me. As for the title which I found very unusual. I was intrigued to see that W.B. Yeats was Didion's inspiration, as shown in the last two sentences of his poem:"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"Why did she
I read this essay collection Joan Didions first earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind. Ill never forget the books opening essay, Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream, which on the surface seems like an account of
My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray
Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didions second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about 60s California.
First published in 1968 to wide popularity, this collection of essays and journalism is a time capsule to the 1960s, for better and for worse, and mostly relating to the experience from a California perspective. There's no question to its significance. When it was published, I suspect readers were thrilled to have someone finally describe life in blunt terms. Reading it today, I found its strengths still lie in the authentic, slice-of-life style. Since I didn't live through the '60s, it felt
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference." Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar
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