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A review by shiverkitty
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
5.0
I don't know how I slept on Joan Didion for so long. I read the forward and needed to take a break. I'm not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said, so I guess I'll stick to basics. Her prose is sharp and clear, her tone is dry like your most entertaining friend on her second martini , and she is sometimes, but not always, hilariously shady.
I was hesitant to read this at first because I wondered what I would get out of essays written in the 1960s, in the thick of counter culture. I'm suspicious of people who write off counter culture as an acid-fried clusterfuck, but Didion manages to have a measure of compassion and ask why the kids she finds in the streets of San Francisco were failed. The essays had some references I didn't get, but they were universal.
Reading the Yeats poem that inspired the title was interesting too - such bombast and terror. I would not have expected the writer, stone-faced and smoking her cigarette, to identify with a poem that captures the same energy as a street preacher raving about the end of the world. No artifice.
I was hesitant to read this at first because I wondered what I would get out of essays written in the 1960s, in the thick of counter culture. I'm suspicious of people who write off counter culture as an acid-fried clusterfuck, but Didion manages to have a measure of compassion and ask why the kids she finds in the streets of San Francisco were failed. The essays had some references I didn't get, but they were universal.
Reading the Yeats poem that inspired the title was interesting too - such bombast and terror. I would not have expected the writer, stone-faced and smoking her cigarette, to identify with a poem that captures the same energy as a street preacher raving about the end of the world. No artifice.