This took me a while to get into but I liked it in the end. I bought it at dog eared books in San Francisco and I wish I had read more of it before/during my visit to California. It’s really interesting, and I especially liked the chapters about the underbelly of the military contracts paying for everything in the California suburbs. I also liked the stories about pioneers, I feel like not many pioneer narratives are that unromantic. The book was was pretty meandering and I never really knew where we were headed next, so even though it is a pretty short book it took me three weeks to read. It was also my first Joan Didion and I wonder if it’s more appealing to people familiar with her style and biography.

Despite at least two of her books having been key players in my wife and I's courtship, I'd never read anything by Joan Didion. I'm attached to the class where it is impossible to not hear good things, but the subject matter had always seemed ambiguous and the comparative cost too great. I will try to rectify that as much as possible in the future.

I think it's first important to set this book up as what it is (a personal narrative woven into certain historical contexts) and what it is not (a history book). It is also not exposé, diatribe, or sociological treatise. Joan focuses on classes, people, and stories that are relevant to the California that she knows, and that sets the limits of the analysis.

Within those limits, she goes on a journey parallel to her forebears journeyings across the middle of the continent. The destinations she reaches, and their limitations, were fascinating to me as an Easterner who by way of marriage has begun to spend far more time than anticipated in the very places she describes. What was more impressive, however, was her unswerving moral attitude in examining the places and especially the people she encountered, studied, and most especially interviewed. Much like the great-grandmother she described in the book as having unyielding values, she deals a rigidly fair hand to all those described here, declining to condemn even as she learns harder truths about the place she is "from".

talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique. joan didion is the blueprint

What a useless thing to pretend to rate Joan Didion’s book. The fact that I could not fight my way into this book, yet finished it, speaks entirely to me and my own incapacity to share Ms. Didion’s fascination with her familial and historical anecdotes.

Agradable recorrido por la historia de California.
Didion se vale de la colonización, el desarrollo, la literatura y su propio bagaje familiar para levantar un fresco dividido en cuatro partes. De las cuatro mi preferida es la última, que es muy cortita y habla del final de la vida de sus padres.
Sin lugar a dudas un libro ameno de una escritora muy recomendable. No es lo mejor que he leído de ella, ni mucho menos, pero deja una grata impresión.

Pero si por algo destaca la mirada de Didion, sobre otras cosas, es su gusto por lo pequeño y lo insignificante. Mientras fue en su generación dónde comenzó a forjarse esa obsesión -ya antropológica- por la Gran Novela Estadounidense, Didion se entrega al detalle, a lo pequeño e intrascendente, con una generosidad absoluta. La mirada a Seguir leyendo

I'm not sure how to feel about this: parts of Didion's deconstruction hit deeply personally, right at the core of the apparently timeless experience of growing up a Californian. But parts also feel off beat, missing something enduring about the land and what it offers in reaction to its constant exploitation. Maybe this has become more evident since the book was written: the shadow of wildfires alone lends the state a terrifying agency. Or maybe Didion, with the benefit of age, sees that this too is to be conquered in time by stucco and asphalt. Nonetheless the book's shed new light on something I had 18 years to experience: I'm left thinking especially about those who 'failed' in pursuit of the California dream, and those we leave when we go to pursue it. In this sense, it's already done enough.

Une chronique terrifiante de l'Amérique des sixties, vue par le bout pas fun de la lorgnette. Le recueil s'ouvre sur le Los Angeles de la drogue, avec des histoires de junkies auxquelles on ne comprend rien. Puis on comprend que c'est ça le problème : tout le monde est drogué, et rien ne semble avoir de sens ni d'importance. Bon, on passe à la nouvelle suivante, et on se retrouve chez des gens plus ordinaires, mais le même sentiment d'absurdité demeure, et s'accroît au fil des récits. Côte est, côte ouest, jeunes drogués, journalistes, monde judiciaire, vie privée, même combat : la narratrice (qu'il est difficile de distinguer de l'auteur) montre avec une lucidité tranchante un monde qui n'a pas de sens. Le ton va avec le propos : un récit neutre, avec peu d'analyses, mais d'une netteté glaçante quand il y en a. Je pense que je n'oublierai pas ce livre.

Damnit, Joan

The California of 2019—that which its custodians and citizens imagine as a leader pointing toward America’s future, and that which Fox News fans in red states fear and loathe—is nowhere present in Joan Didion’s magisterial study of California and America. The state of immigrants and of a post-labor world is glimpsed, maybe, but barely. Instead Joan focuses on the change from the world of the settlers and their radical individualism and belief in California as the place of good luck and second chances...to the exhausted, underemployed, overincarcerating, undereducating place of the Clinton years letting out into the W years. As an attempt at understanding “the California idea,” as well as the Joan Didion idea, WHERE is nonpareil, maybe, all told, her greatest work.

The first half dragged for me — I think it would have more meaning for a native Californian. By part 3, though, I was hooked and a little teary … love you Joan!!!!!!!

i wasn't sold on this one at first but damn ms. didion got me again. the ending made even the parts i didn't love feel worthwhile because they all culminate in such a resonant way. so five stars for the ending, which is really about grief. she's so good at cutting through romanticism and nostalgia without belittling the power emotions hold over us. most of her nonfiction i've read about california is from the 60s and 70s, so it was wild to encounter in this book (pubbed 2003) her perspective on a california that feels closer to the one i know, some of which literally feels like my backyard--the northrop grumman buildings of the south bay, one of which is the parking lot where i learned to drive at 16, doing figure 8s with my dad in the passenger seat.