Description
Book SynopsisThis comprehensive edition brings together for the first time three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. Prefaced with a new introduction by Joan Didion.Live and Learn comprises three of the personal essay collections that established Joan Didion as a major figure in the modern canon arranged in chronological order so that readers can appreciate not only the qualities of the essays per se, but also their evolution over time. It also includes a new introduction by Joan Didion herself.The stylistic masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) has become a modern classic, capturing the mood of 1960s America and especially the center of its counterculture, California. The cornerstone essay, an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, sets the agenda for the rest of this book depicting and America where, in some way or another, things are falling apart and the center cannot
Trade Review'In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand ... A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country' The New York Times Book 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 ... the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism' Robert Towers, New York Times Book Review 'Didion manges to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance) 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' 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' San Francisco Chronicle
