3.5 stars
A bit of a sampler of Didion’s essays from a number of other works. Some feel a bit dated, but overall I was struck by how much I wish journos today wrote more like her. She provides such a breadth of context to the issues she is writing about. Her article on the Central Park 5 (written before their exoneration) is a fascinating exploration of how urban narratives and myth making around the identity of NYC contributed to the coverage and biases around the case and highlight the inconsistencies that might have generated reasonable doubt. The piece on the shifting frames of post-9/11 public dialogue in the US was both beautifully written and compelling. And I definitely need to track down Salvador so that I can read the whole thing.

Thoughtful and prescient

As a collection goes,this is first rate. Didion is not afraid to look behind the scenes in culture or politics. Although some pieces were published in the early 2000's, it it still evoked echoes of U.S. policies that reverberate today.

in the essay i just read, she was sticking it to nancy reagan. now she is deconstructing the new york story, one line of contrived narrative at a time. her prose is breathless, her lines of argument incredibly well reported if not always so well reasoned. a very interesting read at a time when political reportage is a bit lackluster.

oh, how i love didion...

You know how in cartoons, when a smoke catches a character's nose, then the said character starts to dreamily float toward the source? Didion's writing is like that. Except the smoke is not from food, but from her cigarette/joint she's smoking while she's side-leaning on the blackboard, and reporting on some political event with her lips only slightly parting, and while holding a long stick to point out the fascinating details she has listed about the topic. Brilliant writer.

Trying to fill in the total empty space in my reading under the didion heading. Here is a short collection pulled from her varied writings. So far, so good. I liked her non-fiction pieces on Patricia Hearst and El Salvador. Time will tell. The back blurb claims that Didion "expresses an unblinking vision of the truth." hmmm. I don't even know what that means.

My rating is not a reflection on Didion or her writing, although I didn’t agree with all of her takes on the excerpts from After Henry. Jack Edwards said he can’t rate a book too high if he can’t understand the purpose of existing outside of a money grab and I agree with that. This book is just a collection of snippets from Didion’s other books. It didn’t need to exist. You could just read her books in full.

Didion writes essays that don't argue for any real, discernible view. She more just gives observations that make you put your finger to your chin and think. At times she performs the same conspiratorial dot-connecting of which she complains about Reagan. But since it's not necessarily an argument piece, there's really nothing to disagree with. I've never read any of Didion's essays before and this felt like a good starting point. A times her viewpoint is frustrating and other times interesting. But they all achieve the most important point: They got me thinking.

From Patty Hearst to 9/11, Saint Joan digs deeper and better than anyone for her truth.

I think Joan Didion is at her best when she's talking about California- about its culture, its news, or her history there. Her strength decreases the further from California she gets: she's pretty good writing about New York (which, I think, is closer to California than much of the country in between), and less good writing about Miami and El Salvador. This collection of essays spans all of those territories, and about twenty-five years in her career, from the late 70s to about 2003. The highlights involve crimes: the Patty Hearst case, the Central Park Jogger case, 9/11. She's also got a few good ones about politics- mostly about the major scandals in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Nothing here is as earthshaking as her classic essays "Goodbye to All That" or "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream", but they're all solid, interesting pieces. Good enough that I'm considering buying her omnibus "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live" to get the rest of the books that these essays were pulled from.

Probably not a fair review because I had just recently finished 2 of the books from which excerpts were taken for this collection. I found the material a weighty, not necessarily enlightening, retelling of history.