East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Slouching towards Bethlehem, [essays], Joan Didion

eng

no index present

non fiction

Slouching towards Bethlehem

48648329

Joan Didion

[essays]

"In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand - the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion - but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own."--BOOK JACKET"It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not." Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, this collection captures the mood of 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California. These essays, keynoted by an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, all reflect that, in one way or another, things are falling apart, "the center cannot hold." An incisive look at contemporary American life, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for several decades as a stylistic masterpiece

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