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Books : The White AlbumIn association with Amazon.comby: Joan Didion  Dewey Decimal Number: 081 EAN: 9780140056785 Format: Import ISBN: 0140056785 Label: Penguin Manufacturer: Penguin Number Of Pages: 224 Publication Date: 1981 Publisher: Penguin Studio: Penguin Sales Rank: 3167712 Related Items:
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 Rating:  - In Ghostlier Demarcations Keener SoundsThe traditional essayist is a sense-maker and an imposer of order, and in order to make sense and impose order traditional essayists assume an authorial command over their material (which is often their own lives, and/or their own historical period). But the really good essayists do not present themselves as authority figures who have the power to make sense of themselves and/or of the historical period they are living through. The good ones know that ages do not have names and that people remain ... Read More Rating: - A world-class essayist4.5 stars I read this when it first came out; it opened my 13-year old eyes to many things. One that has stayed with me is that Didion isn't constantly writing as a woman. She writes as a person and a thinker. She has a distinctly female viewpoint, but doesn't hit the reader over the head with it like a weapon. She lulls and then challenges you with her intelligence and perspective, and by the end you just naturally think, of course women are as smart as men. Maybe smarter. My Dad loved ... Read More Rating: - Romantic ethicFrom 1966 to 1971 the author felt she had lost her script. It was hard to surprise her, hard to get her attention. At San Francisco State, in a campus uproar, the third president of the institution was referred to as Hitler Hayakawa. All narrative is sentimental. Connections are equally meaningful or senseless. Five years after James Albert Pike pronounced Grace Episcopal Cathedral finished, he left the Episcopal Church. He drove into the Jordanian wilderness with his new wife to experience Jesus's ... Read More Rating:  - She Always Has an Eye, and an Ear Joan Didion always seems to look out at you from her book jackets in a straightforward, level-headed way, yet her readers will know she has a somewhat cockeyed view of life. Very Californian, as she quotes Bernard De Voto,"'The West begins, where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." But hardly sunny, she's dark,dark: she has made the literature of nervous breakdown her own. We saw it in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "Play It As It Lays," and "A Book of Common Prayer;" also in "The ... Read More Rating: - Brutal, honest, and realDidion's genius, in the book and a half of hers that I've read, is to waste not a single word on her evisceration of the culture she saw around her. But "evisceration" isn't the right word, and her essays thus far haven't really been about the culture around her. She sees a United States that is unintentionally ironic at every turn, and that has fallen apart in ways that ultimately crawl under all of our skins and drive us insane. The idealism of the Sixties turned into the madness of the late Sixties, and ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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