Slouching Towards Bethlehem
-
-
5.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades 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.
Customer Reviews
Swinging Sixties
4.5 stars
The author (1934-2021) was a much revered American writer and journalist, Along with Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe, she is regarded as one of the founders of so-called “New Journalism”, which injected literary techniques and a subjective perspective into reportage during the 1960s and 1970s.
The title of this collection of writing about the sixties, which first made her name, comes from a poem ‘The Second Coming’ by W B Yeats (see footnote). It concludes:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
The book includes pieces about John Wayne, Howard Hughes, the counter-culture in Haight-Asbury, and a motel in Death Valley that were truly extraordinary pieces of writing when I first read STB in the 1970s and still are. Some of the other essays might have not aged so well, but they remain superior to anything of similar vintage by Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe IMO. Ms Didion was an exceptional talent, well worth re-reading.
Footnote
The third line of The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” provides the title of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s 1958 masterpiece about colonialism “Things Fall Apart” and of the 2017 Netflix doco about Didion directed by Griffin Dunne: “The Center Cannot Hold.”