What has happened to freedom of speech in America? Why are we not publicly and openly debating the self-serving and undeomocratic policies of the Bush administration? Didion, in another fine essay on American life, asks these questions and tries to answer them. This is a fine book for anyone who worries about our nation proceeding out of control in its war for oil and corporate interests. Didion is clear in her concerns about why we have lost our powers of free speech and citizenship. A must read for anyone who cares about this nation.

I read this book so many years ago, but I just now realized I had never shared my opnions about it. I had lived in Miami for about eight years, and I think I was in my 5th year or so when I finally heard about "Miami" by Joan Didion. It was only after I had finally moved to the Beach that I happened upon it, at Kafka's. At any rate, it is an excellent book. I think about it every time I hear on the news about the bumbling CIA or news of Castro makes the NYTimes. Incidentally, 1987 also saw the publication of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," by Edna Buchanan, another equally excellent non-fiction book about this city. I also highly recommend "A Book of Common Prayer" by Ms. Didion.

I've got a bone to pick with Joan Didion, but first let me say that "Miami" is a simply brilliant piece of noir journalism that, in every paragraph, reflects a different aspect of "the Capital of Latin America." Odd that 1987 saw three major non-fiction Miami treatments, all differently motivated: David Rieff's "Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America," T.D. Allman's "Miami: City of the Future," and Didion's book. Yeah, yeah, at the time, Miami was hot hot hot, Crockett and Tubbs were in the middle of their run, but...Iran-Contragate was also playing itself out, and Miami was an epicenter of Reagan-era, better-dead-than-Red, Contra War intrigue. Didion captures the period beautifully in suitably ominous, conspiratorial tones. She introduces us to a cast of chilling characters--no, wait: she means for us to UNDERSTAND her characters as the driven, chilling, formidable products of "el exilio" and "la lucha"--and leaves no doubt that these are serious men, men who "get things done," men capable of, well, anything.

And my bone? Didion is a wonderful writer who cannot, however, resist long, convoluted, patience-trying Germanic sentences, frontloaded with the universe, embellishing adjective after adjective, wending their way down the page, forestalling all gratification, clarity, or meaning, until finally hitting us between the eyes with the final word-punchline, which invariably leads our eyes to course back up the page in an effort to reconstruct, to rediscover "just where were we going with this." Small price to pay for so delicious a book.

As a 23 year resident in Miami (from NYC) I was astonished at Didion's eloquent articulation of what I haven't been able to describe but have pondered over these many years--the cultural and cognitive disconnect between native Americans and disgruntled Cuban exiles. They talk about LA, but Miami really is Never-Never Land with impossibly obdurant and involuntary immigrants who have no clue or stake in the American values of reasoned discourse, free speech, and fair play and no desire to abandon the cultural attributes that have allowed them to suffer under one form of tyranny or another for a long long time. This books explains what they are thinking--the Cubans--and why they behave the way they do. Well-researched, accurate, and beautifully crafted prose.

Arguably, this is one of a handful of great modern american novels from the last quarter of the 20th century. from its remarkable opening chapter, it weaves a hypnotic spell, with didion's characteristic romanticizing of despair and existential angst. this is a novel of sentences. sentences to be savored, and read aloud. sentences without one extraneous word; as balanced as poetry, and utterly perfect from the first syllable to the last. didion remains one of the few writers who can comment on a scene by way of description. the details she focusses upon serve to illustrate her vision in a manner only a small handful of authors can manage. it is the mark of a master, and this is, without question, her masterpiece. it is didion's reportage and essays that have made her reputation, but this very challenging and utterly flawless novel is the equal to her non fiction prose. it is not a novel for the casual reader. however, for any student of delusion, and any admirer of serious literature of the highest order, a book of common prayer is an essential text.

Didion's opening line ... "I shall be her witness" says it all.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As with all of Ms. Didion's books, I take my time with them, to truly cherish her writing style. I am a huge fan of her use of characterization, as well as her use of grammer. (Besides this book, I regularly recommend Play It As It Lays and Miami, two other great books by Ms. Didion.) Everytime I think of this book, I think of how the brave narrator, in the course of the developments of the novel, regrets, with the last line in the book, the opening statement she made in the book's lead. One of the all-time best books I've ever read, you have got to give this book a read, too.

There is, wrote Charles Baudelaire, a vice which is uglier, more wicked and filthier than any other, a vice which he called "L'Ennui". This is a stronger term than the mere "boredom" which is its literal meaning, because the word also implies a state of indifference and moral and spiritual deadness. It is a state of mind frequently invoked in Baudelaire's poetry, and one which is also at the centre of Joan Didion's novel.

The central character is Maria Wyeth, a Hollywood actress in her early thirties. Fate has, in many ways, been unkind to her- her mother died in a car crash, her career is in trouble, her marriage to an uncaring husband is also failing and she has a mentally-handicapped daughter. Maria reacts by retreating into the sterile world occupied by most of the novel's other characters, one of casual and promiscuous sex, drink, drugs and "Ennui", both in its literal and its extended Baudelairean senses.

Told in a series of very short vignettes, the novel traces the progress of the disintegration of Maria's life. She is bullied into an abortion by her husband. (It is interesting that a novel by a woman writer treats abortion not as a woman's right but as another weapon of male dominance). Her marriage ends in divorce. In the final scene her moral nihilism means that she deliberately fails to prevent the suicide of a friend.

Much of the book is set in the deserts of southern California and Nevada, and Maria spends much of her time driving on long but aimless car journeys through this landscape. The imagery of the desert is clearly used to suggest the aridity of the spiritual world in which the characters live, and Maria's meaningless journeys are a symbol of her inability to escape this world. It is noteworthy that although the book is set in the late sixties or early seventies, a time of great ferment and social change in America, news of the outside world plays virtually no part in the book; Miss Didion's characters seem able to shut it out completely.

The bleakness of the world inhabited by Maria and her acquaintances means that this is certainly not a feelgood novel. It is, in many ways, not an easy one to like. It is, however, certainly one worth reading.

At some time in many people lives, they reach a point where they ask themselves, what's the purpose of life; in Joan Didion's book, "Play It As It Lays", Maria Wyeth, the main character, finds herself asking that very same question. Didion's book follows Maria's journey through this point in her life, examing her feelings, thoughts and actions.

"Play It As It Lays," takes place in Hollywood in the late 1960's. It's written from a struggling actress's point of view. She's reached a crossroads in her life and pushes everything to the side for a while. Focusing on nothing in particular, her friends begin to think she's lost her mind, when all she wants is to make a little sense of her hectic surroundings. "I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing."(214) The setting that Joan Didion chose to use really defines the story. Hollywood itself, no matter what time era, has its own personalities, moods and excitement. The late 1960's, was a time of contemporary society, the culture was characterized by emptiness and ennui. As the characters are all part of the entertainment business, their lives revolve around attaining a certain level of social standings, and this in term sometimes leads to mental breakdowns. Their lives set the mood and the atmosphere within the story. Didion's style of characterization does an excellent job of developing the setting, as well as revealing the theme over time.

What would life be like if it was meaningless, if the people we associated with were plastic? not real? pretentious? What if our life was just a hopeless void with loose morals, drugs, hollow sayings and beliefs? What if we just played the empty game of life as it was laid down for us? That is the main theme in Joan Didion's classic book that takes the reader into the life of Maria Wyeth, actress, mother, daughter, divorced wife, a woman who has grown tired and desensitized to the fakeness and pain caused by the Hollywood and Las Vegas establishment.It is a life filled to the brim with movie premiers, booze, pills, suicide, casual, empty sex, abortions and nothing else. It is a world of plastic surgery and beautiful people, of Let's do lunch and venomous gossip. The sneering, caustic tone of Didion's voice would want to make anybody who lived the lives of the novel's characters put a gun to their head and end it all. The language is stinging, fast-paced, lean, anti-Hollywood. Pure Didion!

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.

Decades after the fact, this collection of essays is a bit of a period piece, but some of it holds up quite well. The subject of the famous title story -- which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 -- is about the Haight Street scene and, more to the point, the breakdown of human connection that Didion believed that scene represented. She is similarly gloomy about New York in "Goodbye to All That," and about California in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." Though she was in her late 20s and early 30s when she wrote this material, she clearly saw much of what was going on in the 1960s as the activities of a different generation from her own. In any case it's these pieces, along with one about John Wayne, that stand out here, and remain, after all these years, pretty close to extraordinary. Some of the other material (a piece about Joan Baez, etc.) is less memorable. I bought this in the hardback Modern Library edition with a useless introductory essay by Elizabeth Hardwick (but a great photo of Didion on the front cover). Should've gone with paper.

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.

I had several problems with this collection of essays, but first and foremost among them was Ms. Didion's, shall we say, different writing style. [The following sentence does reflect my views but, for purposes of illustration, is written in Didion-speak:] I cannot believe that others who have read these essays have not had a similar reaction, because she seems to have an extreme aversion to periods which, when combined with her love of including multiple concepts in each sentence (often set forth by use of parenthetical footnotes or illustrations), and further combined with her EXTREME use of the passive tense--in which the main thrust of the message she was trying to convey in the given sentence is withheld until the very end of the sentence--made for numerous sentences that were virtually impossible to follow the first time through and instead required 3 and 4 re-readings, and even then were difficult to follow. If I didn't know that Ms. Didion already has an established reputation as a superb writer with, as the NYT calls it, ""ice pick/lasre beam/night scope sniper prose", I would have thought some of her writing to be simply abominable. Indeed, I felt that her reputation is so entrenched, that no editor would ever have the nerve to alter any of her writing and so what seem like random (and rambling) musings get committed to the final draft exactly as they appeared in the first draft. That is not to say that her views aren't provocative--I just wish that some of them could have been put to paper by someone else.

Just by way of illustration--and believe me, I could have picked from any one of dozens and dozens of examples--consider the following sentences and see if you can fully follow them the first time through--and note that each of them is just one sentence:

"This account of Mrs. Clinton's not entirely remarkable and in any case private conversations with Jean Houston appeared under the apparently accurate if unsurprsing headline "At a Difficult Time, First Lady Reaches Out, Looks Within," occupied one-hundred and fifty-four column inches, was followed by a six-column inch box explaining the rules under which Mr. woodward conducted his interviews, and included among similar revelations teh news that, according to an unidentified source (Mr. Woodward tells us that some of his interviews were on the record, others "conducted under journalistic ground rules of 'background' or 'deep background', meaning the information could be used but the sources of the information could not be identified"), Mrs. Clinton had at some unspecified point in 1995 disclosed to Jean Houston ("Dialogue and quotations come from at least one participant, from memos or from contemporaneous notes or diaries from a participant in the discussion") that "she was sure that good habits were the key to survival."

Clear as can be, right? Consider this one:

"The "future historian" who might be interested in piecing together the details of how the Clinton adminstration arrived at its program for health care reform, however, will find, despite a promising page of index references, that none of the key participants interviewed for The Agenda apparently thought to discuss what might have seemed the central curiosity in the process, which was by wha political miscalculation a plan initially meant to remove third-party profit from the health-care equation (or to "take on the insurance industry" as Puting People First, the manifesto of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign had phrased it) would become one distrusted by large numbers of Americans precisely because it seemed to enlarge and further entrench the role of the insurance industry."

And finally:

"The more grave misreading, as D'Souza sees it, came from within Reagan's own party, not from his more pragmatic aides (the "prags", or "ingrates and apostates", whose remarkably similar descriptions of the detachment at the center of the administration in which they served suggested to D'Souza "an almost definat loyalty") but even from his "hard-core" admirers or "true believers", those movement conservatives who considered Reagan a "malleable figurehead" too often controlled by pragmatists on his staff."

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Could these views have been expressed with any more clarity than that? Finally, I also felt that there was a certain desultory nature about the essays and they were only connected by a theme to a certain degree. On page 7, she talks about how the political process did not reflect but proceded from a series of fables about the Americna experience. And indeed, a number of the essays do address this topic. But what do her various "book reviews" such as those of books by Dinesh D'Souza, Newt Gingrich and Bob Woodward have to do with that theme. So far as I can tell, not much. In all, it's not a bad book, but I almost wish that Ms. Didion's thoughts could have been committed to paper by someone else.

Yes, Didion's syntax is convoluted; one needs to be patient and attentive while reading this book. Didion spares no one. Clinton is opportunistic and juevenile: slick. What else is new with politicians? Master of the non sequitor, the lunatic Gingrich could have been a character in "Alice in Wonderland". Does Dinesh D'Souza really maintain a straight face when he tells us that Reagan the snoozer and jelly bean popper was in reality a shrewd strategist? The media uncritically bought into the bogus Clinton scandals, hook, line, and sinker. Didion demonstrates that we can't trust the government or the media. Now that we are presented with a threat to our survival, with the government in essence invoking martial law and the media cheering it on, Didion's revelations are topical and profoundly disturbing.

I had been reading Joan Didion's essays in The New York Review of Books for years but I still enjoyed re-reading them in this book. She exposes the likes of Cokie Roberts and Bob Woodward for what they are. Washington Insiders. Not journalists. They are players in the game of politics, actively shaping events instead of just reporting them. They use coded insider language to obscure events and to exclude the public from the national dialogue. Instead of a Goverment of The People we have a goverment of Washington Insiders, consisting of talking heads, lobbyists, contributors. They frame the issues, spin the news and advance their favorite narrative. They are the Permanent Goverment, unelected, unaccountable. No wonder half the people don't bother to vote.

Only two articles were worth-while reading: one about Doris Lessing and the other about Hollywood. The others were totally unimportant.
The author doesn't play in the same league as, for instance, a Simon Leys (about China) or an Ian Buruma (about Japan).

I can't remember what I did with my copy of this book. I either gave it to a friend or threw it in the garbage. Didion is a whiner - she comes across as the poor little rich girl, complaining about being in the studio when Paul McCartney recorded Why don't we do it in the road. Sorry Joan, I wish you could have been there when the Beatles recorded Ob la di, ob la da if the other track wasn't significant enough! Her other noteworthy tidbit is being in the recording studio with the Doors when Jim Morrison showed up late and either too high or too mental to record. Joan should know that life is full of disappointments. However, I know lots of people who would have felt it was exciting to see Morrison in person, even at his crazy worst. If you're looking to revel in the pseudo heartbreaks of a neurot, I recommend this book.

This book is definitely the "Part 2" of a series that begoins with Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and each time that i return to it I feel like I am sitting down with a dear friend that I haven't talked to in a while. Other reviewers seem to have covered the title piece quite well, but I am intrigued that nobody seems to have mentioned my favorite -"Holy Water"- a fascinating look behind the scenes at the California Water Authority. I assign this essay again and again to my environmentalist students, both for the immediate content and for the intriguing window into the seductive nature of technology -one feels that Didion comes to be horrified and walks away enthralled. You will be too.

As a longtime Didion fan I was mildly disappointed with this text. It's cumbersome, swishy, and sloppy. It hints at phrases, and the sort of language she eventually uses later in her writing, but this early novel is exactly that...early. It shows promise, and is not entirely without wit, but it's weak and cumbersome plot, it's overwrought prose, and it's harlequin voice were a disappointment given her profound later works.

This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: but the heirs live on and the Californian sun and hills, rivers and floods, carry on- the part of eternity we can know a little of. I liked this book very much, but the reader should be warned it is not a light read and not written as completely in Joan Didion's famously sharp style as her later works.

...but Run River is her finest novel. "Democracy" is excellent, but it is more a tour de force than a novel. Didion was only in her twenties when she wrote Run River, and it is a winner--stylish but never mannered (something you can't say about her subsequent novels), subdued, witty, assured, and filled with Valley (as in the Sacramento Valley) characters with whom Didion was rather obsessively in love. It is a pity that she seems more interested these days in writing about Washington insiders for N.Y.C./L.A. insiders. Everett McClellan, my favorite character in the book, would not have been able to sustain an interest in such figures as Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr. That Didion can--even if only for the purpose of eviscerating them--is an indication of how far she has strayed from her literary roots. Ah, but what roots they were. Run River is an extraordinary achievement.

This book has a great story to tell, but through the stalling and back-telling the powerfulness of the message is lost. I found that I had to force myself to finish hoping to be swept away by the ending, but was instead left wondering what I had missed. The narrative is confusing and lacks any passion on the subject at hand. However I believe this could be an intriguing movie.

This book was absolutely not good! It never made any sense and skipped around that by the time it got back to a certain person, you had already forgotten who they were and why they were significant! I just read a review and they said it was a romeo and juliet book, i had no idea the main character was even in love, much less there was a second main character! If you have nothing to do for days, and time to write down every character and their significance, read this book, otherwise, really don't waste your time!

Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted is a mysterious, gentle little book that ultimately is quite sad. Elena McMahon does a favour for her father and through that favour and through her we see the large unfathomable world of conspiraces and esponiage boiled to very human elements. There is a cold spareness to the writing that left this reader unmoved until after it was over and then the sadness powerfully washed over me. It is an unique and haunting look at the choices people make and the lives and events that one can affect with simple, irrevocable gestures. A beautiful novel.

No historian of the 20th century will need the comments in this book. They are regional (real estate speculation in California, the 'classes' in California), or local (New York newspaper reports on murders), and out of date (the lower middle class background of the Reagans, the electoral contest Dukakis-Bush).
The author plays not in the same league as a Simon Leys (about China) or a Ian Buruma (about Asia).