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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
by Joan Didion

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/424.Slouching_Towards_Bethlehem_Essays?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917258m/424.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/424.Slouching_Towards_Bethlehem_Essays?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/238.Joan_Didion">Joan Didion</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5552495?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion.  And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene.  For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been  characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become the concerns of "we," to see through many eyes the way Virginia Woolf allows us to do.  Which is why, especially if we are white, we vilify our roots because we often see in our own family histories, a palimpsest of larger histories of injustice and oppression.  We have a melancholic view of history, in which moments of utopian potential are consistently being snuffed out in the name of "order" and "tradition," the very values, in other words, which Didion spent much of her time in the 1960s eulogizing.  She is writing funeral speeches for the passing of milieus whose only apparent meaningfulness is that they are connected to her own biography.  Why we should lament the disappearance of the pathetic stagings and affectations of  a dusty fake aristocracy is not clear to me, why we should take the survivalist grit of the pioneer generation as ethical models for the present even less so. The Indians are amongst us, protect your own, defend your lifestyle against all costs.  These are the imperatives of the Right, old and new, Goldwater and Bush. Circle the wagons against the strange and the new.  I admire Didion for the razorblade incisiveness of her critique but her unwillingness to open her subjectivity up to the world makes it difficult to think of her as an ally.  
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/235153?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Quinn's review
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I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become the concerns of "we," to see through many eyes the way Virginia Woolf allows us to do. Which is why, especially if we are white, we vilify our roots because we often see in our own family histories, a palimpsest of larger histories of injustice and oppression. We have a melancholic view of history, in which moments of utopian potential are consistently being snuffed out in the name of "order" and "tradition," the very values, in other words, which Didi...more

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message 1: by Michelle

09/04/2007 07:45AM

Keep in mind that Didion was a Goldwater Republican when she wrote these in essays which explains the scathing indictment of the Haight-Ashbury scene:

"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."

Anything written in the 70's and beyond embodies the privileged liberalism she now espouses...apparently a reaction to Reagan and "faux conservatism".