The White Album Essays [Paperback]

First published in 1979,The White Albumrecords indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the eraincluding Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mallthrough the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision,The White Albumis a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Contents

I. THE WHITE ALBUM
The White Album

II. CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC
James Pike, American
Holy Water
Many Mansions
The Getty
Bureaucrats
Good Citizens
Notes Toward a Dreampolitik

III. WOMEN
The Women's Movement
Doris Lessing
Georgia O'Keeffe

IV. SOJOURNS
In the Islands
In Hollywood
In Bed
On the Road
On the Mall
In Bogota
At the Dam

V. ON THE MORNING AFTER THE SIXTIES
On the Morning After the Sixties
Quiet Days in Malibu

[Didion] can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes. San Francisco Chronicle

All of the essays--even the slightest--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. Add to these her highly vulnerable sense of herself, and the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism. Robert Towers, The New York Times Book Review

Didion manages to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O'lso