The White Album [Paperback]

Joan Didion (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 1993

This collection of essays recounts what took place on the long morning after the 1960s, when everyone was coming down from their particular bad trip. Didion observes the dramas that explode as America goes into collective detox: the mother abandoning her five-year-old daughter on the central reservation of Interstate 5; Huey Newton and the Black Panthers preaching from their cells; students, in unconscious parody, simulating the disaffection of the 1960s. Didion hangs out with the Doors, parties with Janis Joplin, shops with the Manson clan, dines with Polanski and Sharon Tate, and goes to biker movies, "because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from the 'New York Times'". Joan Didion has also written "Sentimental Journeys" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem".

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo (January 25, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006545866
• ISBN-13: 978-0006545866
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,947,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"All of the essays manifest not only [Didion's] intelligence but an instinct for details that continue to emit pulsations in the reader's memory and a style that is spare, subtly musical in its phrasing and exact. Add to these her highly vulnerable sense of herself, and the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism."--Robert Towers, The New York Times Book Review

"Didion manges to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O'Keeffe, the Hoover Dam, the mountains around Bogota) . . . A timely and elegant collection."--The New Yorker

"Didion is an original journalistic talent who can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes."--The San Francisco Chronicle

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Joan Didion is the author of five novels and six works of nonfiction: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Miami, Salvador, After Henry, and Political Fictions. She lives in New York City.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo (January 25, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006545866
• ISBN-13: 978-0006545866
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,947,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction. Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River are available in Vintage paperback.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great follow-up to her earlier work December 7, 2001

By John Anderson

Format:Paperback

This book is definitely the "Part 2" of a series that begoins with Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and each time that i return to it I feel like I am sitting down with a dear friend that I haven't talked to in a while. Other reviewers seem to have covered the title piece quite well, but I am intrigued that nobody seems to have mentioned my favorite -"Holy Water"- a fascinating look behind the scenes at the California Water Authority. I assign this essay again and again to my environmentalist students, both for the immediate content and for the intriguing window into the seductive nature of technology -one feels that Didion comes to be horrified and walks away enthralled. You will be too.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Many mornings after the 60s May 1, 2001

By R. Walker

Format:Paperback

The White Album was published in 1979, and most of the material here is from the 1970s. Even so, the book is at least as much about the 1960s as is Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Like that book, this is a collection of essays from various publications, plus some previously unpublished material. It's a mixed bag. The title piece is quite strong, as is "On The Morning After The Sixties," proving, perhaps, that the 1960s really were Didion's one true subject. There's other good stuff here, too, and the book is actually sort of underrated, since so many observers rate it a poor second to Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But the Didion style is actually quite strong in this volume, sharply observed, carefully written, personal without being confessional, and always flirting with detachment but not quite achieving it. Obviously some people just can't stand Didion's essays, and this book would hardly change their mind; but if you're open to her style, this is worth reading.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guide Through the Sixties November 7, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Didion is a master of prose and arresting journalism. Like Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, she places herself within the action, identifying her place in historical events. She recounts the 60s, and its epicenter, California (especially Los Angeles), with precise lucidity--Didion was there, and DOES remember the 60s. Some of the most intruiging essays are those that serve as memoirs for her time and place--waiting with the Doors for Jim Morrison to show up for a recording session, travelling through Bogota, exploring California's water systems. Required reading for Angelenos.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishing collection July 9, 2006

By E. Kutinsky

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The praise gets heaped on Slouching Towards Bethlehem (as well it should), but after finishing The White Album, there is no doubt in my mind they are equals in every way - an eloquent, painstaking, timeless collection of one unexpected, evocative observation after another. The appeal of Didion's writing is often to glimpse the author underneath her thick and specific veils of details, to marvel at the way her specifics are often more telling about her than about what she's writing - her own sense of dislocation amidst the silly late-60's music industry, her heartbreak within a charred orchid greenhouse, her rather endless defensiveness of California in Hollywood board rooms and Beverly Hills restaurants. In that, my favorite piece in this flawless collection is the 3-page description of Georgia O'Keefe: "'The men' believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O'Keefe painted New York. 'The men' didn't think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas." It's a proud and bold description of a proud and bold woman, but what it really is is a treatise on what it means to be inspired and emboldened by the work and life of someone who came before you. A similar piece could be written on the uncompromising career of Didion, and it could be written following any essay in The White Album.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In Ghostlier Demarcations Keener Sounds September 30, 2008

By Doug Anderson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The 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 mysterious, even to themselves.

Though there have been other essayist that share Didion's disdain for simplistic narrative, she really does not belong to any tradition of American essayists. But she's not a champion of the avant-garde either (not in the way Sontag was). I would say that her temperament is conservative (she wants things to make sense, to cohere) but never governed by or determined by any ideological preconceptions of how things should be or how we would like them to be. Her narrative style acknowledges and accomodates complexity and combats simplicity as well as undermines our desire to fully comprehend. Her work presents a challenge to what we know as well as our ways of knowing. Therefore reading Didion is unsettling, discomfitting. The essays succeed precisely because she does not try to name the thing that she writes about with nice clarifying titles or topic sentences, rather she presents her own competing impressions and competing ideas about the unnamable something that has her interest.... What has her interest in THE WHITE ALBUM are the 1960's and early 70's and here she is very good at conveying her own singular impressions of that particularly chaotic time, or, more accurately, her own motions of thought and cognitive insecurities during that moment in time when no event or person encountered seemed to be operating according to rational or knowable laws. She is in many ways our poet of the irrational. Instead of presenting her observations in neat linear patterns that follow a single structuring logos, she presents them as the myriad fragmented interventions that they are. She leaves the sense-making, the imposition of order, to others. Read more ›