Rating: 
Summary: EEK! This book proved to be dull
Review: I was required to read this book for my AP English class and had heard how boring it was, but was actually expecting to enjoy it. The first few pieces are rather interesting, while the rest were long and dreary. I guess perhaps if you experienced the time period and actually cared about the issues and places she discussed, this book may appeal to you.
Rating: 
Summary: Accurate Purveyor of American Culture
Review: Joan Didion set the precedent for contemporary non-fiction in this, her most famous series of essays about American life. Though some of them are a bit dated (especially for younger readers who may not have directly witnessed the unfolding of the 60s), they do represent a wide cross-section of the best and worst of our society. "Slouching Towards Bethelem," the title essay, is written with such a deadpan manner it's hard not to laugh at loud at some points (Example: when a strung out kid asks Didion her age and she replies "32", he pauses then reflects, "Don't worry...there's old hippies, too.") But Didion is more than a casual observer of events...she really delves into the history of California and its people, so this is less a "light" read, but enjoyable and educational nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: Accurate Purveyor of American Culture
Review: Joan Didion set the precedent for contemporary non-fiction in this, her most famous series of essays about American life. Though some of them are a bit dated (especially for younger readers who may not have directly witnessed the unfolding of the 60s), they do represent a wide cross-section of the best and worst of our society. "Slouching Towards Bethelem," the title essay, is written with such a deadpan manner it's hard not to laugh at loud at some points (Example: when a strung out kid asks Didion her age and she replies "32", he pauses then reflects, "Don't worry...there's old hippies, too.") But Didion is more than a casual observer of events...she really delves into the history of California and its people, so this is less a "light" read, but enjoyable and educational nonetheless.
Rating: 
Summary: An artful portrayal of recent history's most tribulent era
Review: Joan Didon presents each and every side of a confused generation lost in a power struggle. Didon offers equal time to every part of the sixties counter-culture: presenting the stories of way-word wives, run-away brides, peacifistic celebrities, and pseudo-intellectuals in a sensitive, unbiased, and highly human light. But, her most sensitive works are those that temper her individual and unique perspectives; a series of essays that offer insights into the depths of the essayist's own sole. Highly readable and well worth the invested time and finance. In all honesty, perhaps the most enjoyable required reading I have encountered this year.
Rating: 
Summary: Revealing grab bag of 'new journalism' from the '60's
Review: Like a lot of folks I have a fascination with the '60's and the title essay from this collection, a look at the hippie 'scene' in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, is one of the classic contemporary reports on the counter-culture. Ironically the title, picked from Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming', was intended to suggest that hippiedom was the coming paradigm; in reality Didion completed her essay shortly before the 'death of the hippie'. She did no real investigating and so never saw the beatnik connection: the hippies were both a continuation of Beat philosophy and a human overload that collapsed the fragile community that had developed in the area in the early '60's. The irony is compounded by another essay in the collection in which she revisits her childhood town - Sacramento, California's state capital. Didion never mentions it but the Governor was at the time a certain fellow named Ronald Reagan! A Hollywood politician, beneath the notice of such as our journalistic Joan. Well, at least someone WAS slouching toward Bethlehem... Didion affects a kind of cool, ironic detachment but like Tom Wolfe, another of the formerly 'new' journalists, there is an underlying disdain of her subjects intended to exalt her judgement at their expense. Ultimately she comes across as a small soul in a large and incomprehensible world.
Rating:
Summary: Smart, sharp, a must-read...
Review: Officials meet in Salinas, California, to determine if the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, owned by Joan Baez, is "detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County." Down in Santa Barbara, a group of men gather on the edge of the Pacific Ocean to "clarify the basic issues" with "high-powered" talk ("Is there any evidence that living in a violent age enoucarages violence?" one man asks. "I think it's the Westerns on television," another responds. "I tend [pause] to agree," was the thoughtful reply). This is California and America in the Sixties as seen by one of the best writers and journalists we have, Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a must-read for any journalism student or anyone who wants a fun and thoughtful point of view. The "news" that is contained in the book is no longer current, but it doesn't matter. The facts of her stories aren't the most important aspects of them. Didion was concerned with the truths or messages behind the stories. While "news" can be as relevant as a day old daily newspaper is current, the stories Didion found a generation ago have their counterparts in today's society. They still apply. I have heard that nothing specific can be learned from the general, but we can learn about the general from the specific. Joan Didion doesn't waste our time with many generalities. She cuts to the specifics. She gives us details - often humorous, absurd, or pathetic. And she delivers them well. This makes Slouching Toward's Bethlehem worth reading. Consider her description of a Las Vegas wedding night: "The marriage had just taken place; the bride still wore her dress, the mother her corsage. A bored waiter poured out a few swallows of pink champagne ("on the house") for everyone but the bride, who was too young to be served. "You'll need something with more kick than that," the bride's father said with heavy jocularity to his new son-in-law; the ritual jokes about the wedding night had a certain Panglossian character, since the bride was clearly several months pregnant. Another round of pink champagne, this time not on the house, and the bride began to cry. "It was just as nice," she sobbed, "as I hoped and dreamed it would be."
Rating:
Summary: Essays of sheer simplicity, intellect, honesty and power!
Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the best book of essays I have ever, by the grace of God, been fortunate enough to own and read. In essay after essay, I found myself saying,"Go on, Joan. You said it, Joan. We are the same, you and I, Joan, etc." That is the type of book Slouching Towards Bethlehem is. Reading it, slowly, meticulously, I felt such a close kinship, a bond, not with the writer but with her words -- so carefully chosen and wonderfully articulated. These essays are not meant, honestly, for teenagers, although, if given a chance, the totality of the book would be most beneficial for their pliable and socially indoctrinated minds. The purport of this book is something that I can so easily identify with: the disappearance of the past for the establishment of a fragmented, roughly organized new society with newfangled, unaccustomed societal perceptions as well as an aggressive casting off of the traditional value system of those who were born and raised a long time before the emergence of the radical, cataclysmic sixties. These essays explore, through author Joan Didion's own feelings and experiences and the feelings and experiences of those she encountered, the disharmononized emotions of the hippy generation vs the elders of the more reactionary periods, periods where: Free Love, Acid Trips, Groovy, Crystal Snorting Gurus and Muumuu Dressed Followers seemed a complex and social oddity in the hierarchy of those who were deemed, "Not with it, man." What is so nice about these essays is that they are not condescending; there were and are thousands upon thousands of citizens and non-citizens alike who had and have no clue whatsoever as to what the counter-culture represented (me, honestly, being one in that vast catagory). Joan Didion thrust herself into its epicenter, and with a keen eye took it all in, trying to understand. The darkness of the counter-culture I think is best represented in the title essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehen" on page 101: "Pretty little 16-year-old chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Hight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy..." That was the darkness of the counter-culture, but that is not representative of the entirety of it. Didion's family can be traced back all the way to the Donner-Reed tragedy in which cannibalism was the well known result. Thus, California is liked to that sole dark act; it is forever historically and symbolically linked, California becoming tarnished and not the land of "Golden opportunity." That is one way of looking at the counter-culture. Or it can be viewed in this fashion, in the essay: "Rock of Ages" about Alcatraz Island on page 208: "I saw the shower room (in Alcatraz) with the soap still in the dishes. I picked up a yellowed program from an Easter service...and I struck a few notes on an upright piano with the ivory all rotted from the keys and I tried to imagine the prison as it had been, with the big lights playing over the windows all night long and the guards patrolling the gun galleries and the silverware clattering into a bag as it was checked in after meals, tried dutifully to summon up some distaste, some night terror of the doors locking and the boat pulling away. But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusion, and empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke..." Maybe that is what the hippy generation was trying to flee from: "Human vanities. Human illusions." Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a book where the search for meaning is in of itself the comprehension of change. And that is what the sixies, like other decades represented, another unusual facet of life.
Rating:
Summary: Writing style is excellent
Review: The first time I read through this book, I thought that it was utterly pointless. However, when I read it again and noted the style of Didion's writing, I came to a much deeper understanding of personalized writing. Her use of words to convey a mood or an atmosphere is clever, engaging the reader. If you read this to enjoy the scenes and situations without expecting a conclusion or a resolution, then you will enjoy this.
Rating:
Summary: just call the whole thing great
Review: These simple but strong essays will stick with you forever. Haunting images are everywhere. The first piece about a woman who kills her husband made me think of many uncomfortable things... and how the murder itself becomes the symbolic loss of a whole country. You can picture that burning Volkswagon long after you put down the book... While each essay is an homage of some sort, as well as an elegy, I still think the final one Goodbye to all That captures Didion's style more memorabley and sadly than the others. New York City as she describes it becomes almost mournful and bittersweet. Doesn't everyone who's been to NY remember their first time there? A fine collection of original reporting.
Rating:
Summary: American Anomie
Review: This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties. Many pieces in the first and third sections of the book ("Lifestyles in the Golden Land" and "Seven Places of the Mind") seem rather dated; the piece which made the most impression on this reviewer was the least ambitious of the group; to me, the portrait of Comrade Laski of the CPUSA-ML is a tiny masterpiece of irony. The pieces from the second section ("Personals")were much more enjoyable, especially "On Keeping a Notebook" and "On Self-Respect." Overall, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is more memorable for the author's endearing prose style than for the individual essays.
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