Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THIS IS A STORY about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Lucille Miller, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful . . . A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country."--Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review
-- Review

Review

"In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful . . . A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country."--Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 238 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374521727
• ISBN-13: 978-0374521721
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #294,811 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A period piece, but some of it is classic, January 15, 2001

By	R. Walker - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Modern Library) (Hardcover)

Decades after the fact, this collection of essays is a bit of a period piece, but some of it holds up quite well. The subject of the famous title story -- which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 -- is about the Haight Street scene and, more to the point, the breakdown of human connection that Didion believed that scene represented. She is similarly gloomy about New York in "Goodbye to All That," and about California in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." Though she was in her late 20s and early 30s when she wrote this material, she clearly saw much of what was going on in the 1960s as the activities of a different generation from her own. In any case it's these pieces, along with one about John Wayne, that stand out here, and remain, after all these years, pretty close to extraordinary. Some of the other material (a piece about Joan Baez, etc.) is less memorable. I bought this in the hardback Modern Library edition with a useless introductory essay by Elizabeth Hardwick (but a great photo of Didion on the front cover). Should've gone with paper.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent example of the essay form, September 2, 2005

By	J. Jacobs - See all my reviews

Didion's collection of essays was recommended to me by writing instructors as an example of excellent essay writing. I found it to be just that. In the first third, she writes a series of remarkable essays about California in the late 1960s. The middle third contains personal essays. And the book finishes with a collection of essays about different places she's been - New York, Hartford, Hawaii, Sacramento.

What makes her writing most impressive is her masterful presentation of portraits, inserting herself just occasionally to remind the reader of who the photographer was, to inject humanity. She does an excellent job combining place and character and shows that long sentences can work. This book is useful both an as example to those who aspire to writing better essays and as a memorable voice from the 1960s.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars American Anomie, October 31, 2001

By	"bibliomane01" (Arlington, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties. Many pieces in the first and third sections of the book ("Lifestyles in the Golden Land" and "Seven Places of the Mind") seem rather dated; the piece which made the most impression on this reviewer was the least ambitious of the group; to me, the portrait of Comrade Laski of the CPUSA-ML is a tiny masterpiece of irony. The pieces from the second section ("Personals")were much more enjoyable, especially "On Keeping a Notebook" and "On Self-Respect." Overall, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is more memorable for the author's endearing prose style than for the individual essays.