Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Joan Didion

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008, 1968, English

Nonfiction, General

ISBN: 9780374521721

From the Publisher. The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, 40 years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

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Joan Didion is another brilliant sentence composer with a clear, unflinching approach to her subjects. The essays are almost perfectly structured and I often attempt her stirring combination of the autobiographical and the cultural. Didion is able to capture the essence of a specific moment in subtle but precise ways.

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