The White Album

View other editions of The White Album.
View books by Joan Didion.

Fantastic if you know about the sixties - Rated
Didion is lauded as one of the great chroniclers of the 1960's in America and her journalism is undoubtedly brilliant. She writes coherently with a clear and personal style which is both attractive, intimate and inclusive. She talks to you as if you were a friend. This is great if you know some of the background to the things she is talking about, but wouldn't necessarily help you if you approached this with no prior knowledge of the events and history of the time. It's a great personal and cultural record of the time and a must read for anyone interested in the period.

California, late 60's, early 70's - - Rated
Hotbed of movies, political activism, rock and roll, drugs, and paranoia. A time both fascinating and bewildering, with anything liable to happen on any given day, just down the road - from cult murder to earthquakes. It takes a cool, detached prose style to capture all of this and keep it fresh for the reader visiting that strange time some thirty years later, but Didion's careful essays succeed. Compared to the freneticism of other writers documenting this era (Wolfe, Kesey, etc) she retains a measure of calm and the ability to catch the reader unawares with the unexpected detail which brings the scene to life. It paints a picture of a society stretching to reach its edge, finding freedoms it has been on the retreat from ever since.

Didion's elegance and poise is a model for the modern essay - Rated
So neglected and misleadingly categorised as a 'hip' writer of 60s issues, Didion deserves re-establishment in the forefront of contemporary writing. These essays are so exactly constructed, so tight and precise, that they undermine, simply in terms of form and structure, the cultural sloppiness that is so often her target. Quite simply, beautiful writing.