Review by Booklist Review
Didion's books arrive at regular intervals; her last novel was Democracy , her last nonfiction title, Miami. She's a steady and hard-working writer preoccupied with the lies of public life. This latest collection of essays previously published in The New York Review of Books, New West, and The New Yorker, among others, is divided into sections on California, New York, and Washington. The title essay, one of the book's more personal pieces, is a tribute to the late editor Henry Robbins. We get another bit of autobiography in "Pacific Days" when Didion recalls returning to her alma mater as a lecturer and falling right back into the miasma of student life. Los Angeles comes under close scrutiny in reports on the long reign of Mayor Tom Bradley, the grimness of the fire season, and Hollywood's contempt for writers. The New York piece takes a tough-minded look at the politics of rape and race, while the Washington essays glimmer with damning cynicism and incisive indignation. Her chilling portrait of the Reagan White House covers familiar, but nonetheless fertile, ground and her insider's chronicle of the flagrant phoniness of the 1988 presidential campaign is a timely reminder of how easily the electoral process is controlled by the media. Didion's Byzantine sentences are exhilarating in their complexity of elocution, thought, and scorn: a tonic for those weary of the complacency of mass media pabulum. (Reviewed Mar. 1, 1992)0671727311Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
One of America's premier essayists discusses Patty Hearst, the Central Park ogger, the 1988 Hollywood writers' strike, Reagan and Bush. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Eleven essays, mostly from the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker , are collected here in honor of Henry Robbins, an early, influential editor of Didion who died recently. The pieces zigzag through politics and the current events of the last decade, ranging from California to New York and taking aim at the power hungry, at sentimentality, at the manipulation of language. We see George Bush using a trip to Jordan as a ``photo-op'' to make him look like a man of action and reporters willing to do what politicans want in return for special privileges. The Bradley/Yaroslavsky mayoral race and the rape of a Central Park jogger lead Didion to discuss the characters of Los Angeles and New York City. Didion's journalistic essays are often considered her best writing, and this representative sample will be appreciated by readers who like newsworthy reading.-- Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Didion's latest collection of previously published articles- -her first since The White Album (1979)--reminds us that she's truly one of the premier essayists of our time. For all the disconnectedness she discerns throughout our public life, her prose, in its very complexity, beautifully plays against her subjects. In these pieces, mostly from The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, Didion artfully points out the ``chasm'' between ``actual life and its preferred narratives.'' Organized by place (Washington, D.C.; L.A.; New York), these carefully structured essays help define the culture of our cities, which is otherwise distorted by self-reference and a complicit media. Writing about Reagan-era tell-all books, Didion recasts the Great Communicator as the Fisher King, the keeper of the right-revolutionary grail. On the 1988 campaign trail, she watches a moveable ``set,'' a series of staged events that reveal ``contempt for outsiders'' (i.e., average citizens). In California, Didion documents the ``protective detachment'' that's become part of the frontier legacy. Patty Hearst's survival instinct makes her a typical West Coast girl, as pragmatic as those who live with earthquake jitters. Narrative conflict emerges in Didion's account of the 1988 Screen Guild writers' strike, during which the industry's hierarchy reasserted itself. Likewise, the L.A. mayoral race of 1989 exposed the class and race struggles that everyone in that city would rather ignore. The longest piece here concerns the Central Park Jogger, ``a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.'' Like her essay on the ``Cotton Club'' murder, this stunning bit of meta-analysis proves Didion's contention that every crime--to be of larger interest--needs ``a story, a lesson, a high concept.'' When the theoretical clashes with the empirical, she says, narrative takes over, distorting, transforming, ameliorating. For Didion, truth is in the details, arranged so precisely in her seemingly candid prose. A collection to savor by a stylist in top form.
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