White Album (FSG Classics)

Well written, historic for this era. I enjoyed the book, made me feel like I stepped backwards in her life.

Personally I love Joan Didion. I think this affects my enjoyment and even fascination with all of her work, including “The White Album”. Again, personally this was a five star reading experience for me. However I feel quite positive that this work will not appeal to every reader. It very much depends on what one is looking for…Joan Didion writes both fiction and non fiction. She wrote very interesting and introspective essays about the sixties and seventies. This work is a series of non fiction essays, largely about California during that timeframe. Of all of the works of Joan Didion that I have thus far read, this work reminds me most of “Sloughing Towards Bethlehem”, which remains my favorite non fiction work of Joan Didion.I always read Joan Didion when I have a chance to sit quietly in solitude with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. I clear my head of all distractions. I then sort of lose myself in her thoughts and words. If my mind begins to drift I take a break. If I need to look up references and persons I do so. If it takes me a month to read a work such as this, and it did, so be it…Joan Didion has always been something of an enigma to me. All photographs of her have seem to have the same look on her face. I know she had a husband and child die within approximately one year of each other. That part of her life is documented in “The Year of Magical Thinking”. In this work being reviewed Joan Didion speaks of suffering throughout her life from severe migraines. I either never knew that or it failed to register with me. I can’t help but wonder if facts such as that affect bother countenance and her writing. I can tell you that I am enthralled by Joan Didion, but I have no idea if you will be.In summary, once again I loved this work by Joan Didion. I am attempting to read all of her work in chronological order. However I definitely need a break between her works and it will take several years to complete this project. She is simply too deep and requires too much thought. I never read Joan Didion to the exclusion of all other literature. I never read her work when I am rushed. I always sip, I never gulp. In the event that it matters, I did prefer “Sloughing Towards Bethlehem” to “The White Album”. Thank You for taking the time to read this review.

A must read classic for all women.

The delight that comes from reading one of her essays is sublime. She seems to be a deep observer of a variety of things, yet her observations feel like a breeze blowing through.

Some of her essays, which are personal critiques of notable events and people of the sixties/seventies, are amusing, accessible, straightforward satirical/ironic commentaries. An essay on a born-again pentacostal group in California is one such amusing, smart description of people who, to Didion, suffer from a noticeable lack of common sense and critical judgement. Average Americans can enjoy and chuckle at that essay. But in other essays, such as a critique of the womens' movement, she clubs the reader over the head with a barrage of professorial words like "sententious" and "didactic", "Emersonian". I continually was thinking "what does that mean? What is Emersonian, what does sententious mean? In that essay (womens' movement) she write like an Oxford professor of philosophy or ancient classic literature. In my opinion, it's never necessary to intellectually bully people with arcane, seldom used academic words. Every idea can be clearly, precisely expressed using common every-day language. So, for my taste, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson were more pleasant and fun to read, for satirical, insightful commentaries on American culture. For example, Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full", or "Bonfire of the Vanities".

For anyone interested in the social climate of the 1960s, this book is “must read.”

A select collection of acclaimed and previously published works by celebrated nonfiction author and journalist, Joan Didion.Didion is best known for her fluid and elegantly understated prose, making it a treat to experience the nearly palpable, emotionally-charged dissonance of 1960’s Los Angeles through her sharp observations. She manages epitomizing the complex, mosaic of a period by using her impeccable eye for detail to draw stark parallels from personal experiences as significant events are unfolding all around her, imperative signs of the time. Instead of focusing on macroscale, she magnifies and unveils the overall seedy feeling of growing unrest through tender, poignant digressions in search of purpose behind it. She offers lyrical yet incredibly subtle, meaningful essays that carefully diffuse bits and pieces of context to the greater concept; the failure to find a narrative in her own life, and consequently, in American society. The ‘60’s have come and gone, leaving behind peculiar feelings lingering stagnant in the air surrounding the city as time passes on. She’s a fly on the wall and readers are there with her, in the Sunset Boulevard recording studio anxiously awaiting the arrival of Jim Morrison with the rest of The Doors. They’re at the Alameda County jail seated across the table from Huey Newton as he’s giving Eldridge Cleaver a personal statement regarding the Black Panther Party; they’re helping deliver a hand-chosen dress the morning of Linda Kasabian’s testimony for the Manson family murders. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” her writing style cultivates a sense of taking the reader along for the ride, making them feel like they were there to experience these intimate, quirky morsels in time right there alongside her.Didion’s rhythmic style is illuminated by collage storytelling, conveying the tentative state rearing 1960’s America in a timeless assortment.