I picked this essay collection up based on a Slate article excerpting bits of "In the Realm of the Fisher King"--a beautifully titled account of Ronald Reagan's absentee presidency. It's good too. But most of what's worth reading was excerpted in the article. The rest of it was about all the different name brands of Nancy Reagan and a bizarrely misguided attempt to cast the phony Peggy Noonan as some sort of feminist renegade.

I dutifully read the other essays but they didn't capture my attention too much--California fires, the LA Times changing formats, Patty Hearst.

The final essay might be the best of the bunch. It was about a New York City jogger who was raped and badly beaten in Central Park, and what it said about the city, and what the prosecution of the criminals said about the city. Most notable was Didion's views on the widely disliked Al Sharpton. People make a mistake, she writes, to not understand that for Sharpton being disliked is not a disadvantage; it's another tool in his arsenal.

see, Joan Didion is not just a super smart robot who can see through all of you silly humans and your silly reasons and your silly way of going about doing the silly things you do... see, she has a heart too! here's the proof.

My favorite of the three Didion essay collections that I've read, with the other two being Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Bethlehem probably has more historical significance, but I found this one more substantive and more relevant to me personally, and with fewer of the ponderous essays on wind patterns and what have you, as found in White Album. I especially liked the lengthy dissection of the Central Park Jogger scandal, which takes up the last quarter of the book. It should be required reading for present-day media types, given its relevance to our current situation (though it doesn't discuss Trump's involvement in the scandal in any real depth). But I imagine people might have a problem with some of what she has to say about rape, particularly as it's discussed in the media.

“It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. They had not run for student body office. They had not gone to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a five-dollar ceremony performed by a justice still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They paid their bills or did not pay their bills, made down payments on tract houses, led lives on that social and economic edge referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as “out there.” They were never destined to be, in other words, communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, “the process.”

Notes: One of the most peculiar things about Didion is that I sometimes don’t agree with her politics, but I almost always agree with her about ours. All political operatives, strategists, and hobbyists (categories of people, especially the latter, we should all strive to not be counted within) ought to read her account of the 1988 presidential election; her vision of an election that set a watermark for immateriality and featured all of the banal disconnections from reality that characterize our current political media environment is prophetic (narrative, horse race, set pieces, coverage focused entirely on the meta, and many other elements remain central), dispiriting (she understood how terrible all of this was 33 years ago, and yet here we are), and quaint (the 1988 election seems quite substantive compared to our current contests, where one party is formally policy-free) all at once.

Several individual pieces (I could read Didion on Los Angeles until the Golden State slides into the sea) easily rise to the level of those in her first two collections, but as a collection their comparative lack of cohesion adds up to a somewhat less sublime experience (though, to be clear, a “somewhat less sublime” book than Slouching and White Album is quite a remarkable book!).

A collection of essay's my Joan Didion, mostly centered around politics and social commentary. While I enjoyed the writing very much, Didion is so eloquent, I was bored during a good three fourths of the book. I think it's because I don't really care about what happened in the 80's while Reagan was president, though it was amusing to see that our current president isn't the only inadequate president we've had. I also don't live in LA so I didn't relate at all to the essays about the earth quakes and fires that break out. I did enjoy the last essay on the rape and assault that happened to a jogger in central park because it centered much more around the ideas of race and it felt more relevant even today. The parts of the book that were most interesting were things that were applicable or related to the current day and I had originally thought that the essays about Reagan had been included in the book to draw parallels with the current situation but I'm not so sure after looking at the description now. I do want to read more of Didion's writing now and I only bumped it up to four stars from three because I really like the way she writes. I think I would've liked it more if it didn't center around so much personal experience I do tend to hate memoirs because I'm self centered and other people's lives are boring. I basically had to force myself to read the ones about her growing up in the atomic age and about her experience in college.

So this is Didion after her '60s/'70s peak years, by and large, dealing with the changing landscape of America and largely shifting her focus away from her native California. The pyrotechnics are fewer, the analysis is cooler, and the perceptions are sharp as ever, whatever she's writing about, whether that's politics as team sport, crime as spectacle, or the invisible lines of demarcation that separate out the various camps of the American 1 percent. I'm not sure why she named this After Henry -- that is the title of the first essay in the book, but it's also the title of the weakest and dullest essay. Go figure. After you've worshiped at the temples of The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, pick up After Henry.

I understand why Didion’s early collections get so much attention (60s L.A. is so much sexier than Washington) but this collection gathers some of the best writing of her career. From her critiques of Reagan and the waning ambitions of daily papers to the unfortunately relevant “Fire Season,” so much of her insight has proved prescient. The final essay “Sentimental Journeys,” which examines the narrative forces undergirding the Central Park Five case is one of the greatest essays of all time.

A collection of Didion’s essays from 1992, following the death in 1979 of Henry Robbins, her friend and editor at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Regarding death, given subsequent events, she poignantly says in her introduction:
“As time passed it occurred to many of us that our benign experience was less than general, that we had been to date blessed or charmed or plain lucky, play­ers on a good roll, but by that time we were busy: caught up in days that seemed too full, too various, too crowded with friends and obligations and chil­dren, dinner parties and deadlines, commitments and overcommitments. “You can’t imagine how it is when everyone you know is gone,” someone I knew who was old would say to me, and I would nod, uncomprehending, yes I can, I can imagine; would even think, God forgive me, that there must be a certain peace in outliving all debts and claims, in being known to no one, floating free. I believed that days would be too full forever, too crowded with friends there was no time to see. I believed, by way of contemplating the future, that we would all be around for one anoth­er’s funerals. I was wrong. I had failed to imagine, I had not understood.”

The first section on the political environment of Washington DC is fascinating for a non-American as an analysis of the “process”, and although written over thirty years ago, still read as being relevant both in America and Britain.
The second section contains essays about California, including Girl of the Golden West in which Didion reviews Patty Hearst’s 1982 memoir (Hearst was the daughter of a wealthy Californian family, who was kidnapped and had become a terrorist/criminal), where I had read some of Didion’s notes from the time of the 1976 trial, which were not subsequently published until 2017 in South and West. This can sound a particularly historic piece of journalism, but allows the reader to draw more general conclusions from the specific details, and does so with delicate and stylish prose. I think that the power of her essays arises from her ability to allow the reader to draw conclusions, not the writer.
There is also an essay, Fire Season, about the wild fires that rage across the area around Los Angeles with a punch at the end about what one accepts as normal.
The excellent final New York based essay, Sentimental Journeys, is about the reporting on a Central Park rape case and what it reveals about New York:
Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year (1989) ... but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept.
It was precisely in conflation of victim and city, this confusion of personal woe with public distress, that the crime’s “story” would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution.

After Henry is an interesting collection of essays written by Joan Didion (predominantly during the 1980s) that were originally published in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.

The first essay, ‘After Henry’, which serves as a sort of introduction to the collection, is arguably the most personal of all the pieces, dealing as it does with the death of Didion’s former editor, Henry Robbins, and her realisation that time will eventually catch up with everyone. It is a very moving tribute to a man who was clearly a dear friend as well as an inspirational figure career-wise for Didion.

The remainder of the book is divided into three sections, namely ‘Washington’, ‘California’ and ‘New York’. The ‘Washington’ section deals with politics (or what should perhaps now be referred to as political history) as portrayed and sometimes created in the media. Figures such as Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, George Bush and Michael Dukakis feature heavily, as do the lesser known people who guided their political ambitions and public personas. Some of these political essays seem rather long and it is hard to maintain attention throughout, but there certainly contain some insightful observations that have been borne out over time. Of course, they were probably a lot more compelling at the time of original publication, when the Reagan presidency and the subsequent election campaign were ongoing.

The ‘California’ section is much more varied in terms of its subject matter, including essays on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the media reception she faced after being freed/taken into custody, life in the state and the dreams of childhood, earthquakes, the film business, the mayoral career of Tom Bradley, wildfires and the murder of Roy Radin. There is an eclectic mix of thoughts, facts and predictions, and this section probably has something to offer to every reader.

The final section, ‘New York’, contains only one essay, which concerns the infamous Central Park jogger rape case (an infamy compounded by the fact that a miscarriage of justice is now known to have taken place), but also comments on sexual violence in general, racism and day-to-day life (and death) in the city. It is a powerful, disquieting and alarming essay to end the book with.

After Henry is a great collection of essays and a highly recommended read.

The thing about Joan Didion’s supernaturally wonderful writing is that most often she writes about topics that don’t interest me… American politics and history. This essay collection was particularly focused on these topics, more so than her earlier nonfiction books, and so I only got through most of it on account of my wild admiration for Didion as a stylist and thinker (well, the two are symbiotic really…). Only 'After Henry' and 'Girl of the Golden West' essays held my attention because of their content too. I particularly missed Didion’s personal presence as the character-narrator that used to be more prominent in the earlier essays. I also felt that most of the works in this collection were quite outdated, whereas those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and in White Album books feel more universal, more relevant today too. But the gems of individual sentences… the gems… For example: ‘Wyntoon [a private rural estate] had mists, and allusions to the infinite, great trunks of trees left to rot where they fell, a wild river, barbaric fireplaces.’

Collection of essays by veteran journalist. Many taken from New York Review of Books and the New Yorker.

Deals with political issues and various Americana from the 70's and 80's. One interesting piece on the refugge camps in Hong Kong is the exception. Most of the pieces about life in L.A. and Washington. Book concludes with piece on race in New York City.

Interesting pieces that deal with the ‘story as a story’ in politics and news. The media obsession with presenting ‘a story’ and the public’s demand for this story is a recurring theme. Interesting in the New York piece is the idea that the personalisation of issues obscures the real issues. Concentrates on the ‘central park jogger’ incident and how this was used to create positions and easy ‘news’. Funny piece on the 1988 presidential election and how news was managed including the ‘baseball show’ that was put on by the Dukakis campaign.

Book was interesting enough but the range of subjects covered was rather broad with no central theme working through them. Book came across as disjointed as a result. Still broad thinking and in-depth analysis of various ‘pop’ issues was welcomed.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," updated, for the 1980s and early 1990s. Loved it. This collection of essays is elegant, and as sharp-eyed, as subtle and brutal and intelligent and witty as the other Joan Didion non-fiction collections, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Miami, Salvador, and After Henry. Bravo.