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Sentimental Journeys
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This collection of writing by American essayist Joan Didion attempts to capture aspects of American life and culture and isolate them for public inspection.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,1993
This edition
- Format
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336 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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January 1, 1993 by HarperColinsPublishers
- ISBN
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9780002551465
- ASIN
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0002551462
- Language
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English
About the author
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Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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Said it before but nobody does it like Joan….
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Lots of political pieces and hard hitting journo pieces. Gritty read at times with lots of detailed information.
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it was good, she integrates politics into the personal sphere and vice versa and it doesnt seem forced or preachy
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Wow. Genius.
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I had to read this for my college credit course on a major author. So far, we have been reading selections from her essay anthology. Didion is a fascinating study in that she takes the modes of having character and discipline and applies them to the human condition--taking major historical events and showing how they parallel how a society or an individual (usually herself) feels about a certain issue. This is especially true for her earlier essays from when she was becoming a young adult and stuck between romanticizing her nostalgic past and realizing that she has grown as a person more than if situations had remained the same.
Sentimental Journeys is a fascinating study because Didion takes a journalistic approach to a deeper motif and study on what was going on in NYC in the late 1980's. The media portrayal of certain victims and the wrongfully accused are, of course, themes noticed in today's world. Ironically, Donald Trump insisted the young black men, with no physical or forensic evidence of having committed the crime, were guilty.
The jogger murder was an excuse to the people of NYC to cling to a story that represented the denied divide between social, political, racial, and economic lives in a place that survives on being the melting pot of America. But the very fact of that means there are and will be differences.
What I find most captivating about Didion is that the essays all carry the particular motif of being compared to a story or a narrative. The people of NYC sentimentalized their journeys of life in an effort to express what was really happening. And they used the jogger and her accused rapists to feed into their true feelings about the divides occurring.
I highly recommend this piece to people who are less interested in political standpoints (I have discovered at college that I am not liberal) but more interested in how media portrayal can influence how people use victimization and racism to reflect what is happening in a societal culture. This is especially helpful for writers to understand because these "stories" are so much more--life reflects art and vice versa. Understanding how the world works can help us not only become better writers, but comprehend why people are feeling certain ways and to stop the overtake of those with power.
Sentimental Journeys is a fascinating study because Didion takes a journalistic approach to a deeper motif and study on what was going on in NYC in the late 1980's. The media portrayal of certain victims and the wrongfully accused are, of course, themes noticed in today's world. Ironically, Donald Trump insisted the young black men, with no physical or forensic evidence of having committed the crime, were guilty.
The jogger murder was an excuse to the people of NYC to cling to a story that represented the denied divide between social, political, racial, and economic lives in a place that survives on being the melting pot of America. But the very fact of that means there are and will be differences.
What I find most captivating about Didion is that the essays all carry the particular motif of being compared to a story or a narrative. The people of NYC sentimentalized their journeys of life in an effort to express what was really happening. And they used the jogger and her accused rapists to feed into their true feelings about the divides occurring.
I highly recommend this piece to people who are less interested in political standpoints (I have discovered at college that I am not liberal) but more interested in how media portrayal can influence how people use victimization and racism to reflect what is happening in a societal culture. This is especially helpful for writers to understand because these "stories" are so much more--life reflects art and vice versa. Understanding how the world works can help us not only become better writers, but comprehend why people are feeling certain ways and to stop the overtake of those with power.
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One of the great pieces of 20th century non-fiction: one city, one event, in one hundred pages.
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Das Buch versammelt einige journalistische Arbeiten von Joan Didion aus den achtziger und frühen neunziger Jahren. Zusammengenommen vermitteln die Artikel einen Eindruck von der inneren Verfasstheit der us-amerikanischen Gesellschaft. Allerdings ist es als Leser ohne intime Kenntnisse der lokalen Verhältnisse der damaligen Zeit, oft schwer den Überblick zu behalten. Es fallen u.a. viele Namen von Personen, die mir absolut unbekannt sind. Richtig gut sind die Texte, die allgemeiner gehalten sind. Insbesondere der letzte Teil über einen Vergewaltigungsfall in New York.
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