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In these eleven essays covering the national scene from Washington, DC; California; and New York, the acclaimed author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album “capture[s] the mood of America” and confirms her reputation as one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers (The New York Times).
Whether dissecting the 1988 presidential campaign, exploring the commercialization of a Hollywood murder, or reporting on the “sideshows” of foreign wars, Joan Didion proves that she is one of the premier essayists of the twentieth century, “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review). Highlights include “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” a portrait of the White House under the stewardship of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, two “actors on location;” and “Girl of the Golden West,” a meditation on the Patty Hearst case that draws an unexpected and insightful parallel between the kidnapped heiress and the emigrants who settled California. “Sentimental Journeys” is a deeply felt study of New York media coverage of the brutal rape of a white investment banker in Central Park, a notorious crime that exposed the city’s racial and class fault lines.
Dedicated to Henry Robbins, Didion’s friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979, After Henry is an indispensable collection of “superior reporting and criticism” from a writer on whom we have relied for more than fifty years “to get the story straight” (Los Angeles Times).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 9, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781504045698
- File size: 788 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781504045698
- File size: 2531 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 4, 1992
In her first collection of essays since The White Album , Didion takes a look at the 1980s with her trademark style--at once languid and piercing--intact. Named for her former editor, the late Henry Robbins, who gave his writers ``the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down and do it alone,'' the book compiles 11 pieces (primarily from the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker ) in which Didion revisits various locales and themes that have defined her own ``idea of herself'' as a writer. In a section on California--including piecess on Patty Hearst, the Los Angeles Times , the 1988 Hollywood writers' strike, and various seedy elements of what she calls ``L.A. noir''--Didion offers trenchant observations on ``California as opera.'' A long essay on New York City and the Central Park jogger assault is a brilliant dissection of ``the illusions of infinite recovery and growth on which the city had operated during the 1980s,'' and a reflection on how the crime came to be seen as ``a way of expressing, without directly stating, different but equally volatile and similarly occult visions of the same disaster,'' themes that are constants in her fiction. But her opening section on Washington and politics shows Didion moving beyond older concerns, as well as beyond the journalistic problems that marred the superficial Salvador and the restrained Miami . Her thoughts on ``the narrative of public life''--including the way in which the Reagans ``were the products of studio Hollywood, a system in which performers performed, and in return were cared for,'' and George Bush's ``considerable attention toward improved visuals for the travelling press''--powerfully reveal how political narratives are made up of many ``understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line'' whose only purpose is ``the maintenance of itself.'' By venturing out of her familiar territory and into the complexities of national affairs, Didion proves that she is indeed one of America's premier political observers. -
April 26, 1993
One of America's premier essayists discusses Patty Hearst, the Central Park ogger, the 1988 Hollywood writers' strike, Reagan and Bush.
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