BOOK 173: SLOUCHING TOWARDS
BETHLEHEM: JOAN DIDION
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a
1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California
during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming", by W. B. Yeats.
The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction
(2006).
The title essay describes Didion's
impressions of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the
neighborhood's heyday as a countercultural center. In contrast to the more utopian
image of the milieu promoted by counterculture sympathizers then and now, Didion offered a
rather grim portrayal of the goings-on, including an encounter with a
pre-school-age child who was given LSD by her parents.
In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield
wrote, "Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem, brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by
anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote
has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of 'art,' perhaps it is
possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better
or worse example of what some people call 'mere journalism,' but as a rich
display of some of the best prose written today in this country."
(Information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slouching_Towards_Bethlehem)
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