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Where I was from / Joan Didion.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Vintage International : Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2004Copyright date: ©2003Edition: First Vintage International editionDescription: 226 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0679752862
  • 9780679752868
Subject(s): Summary: [This volume] turns what [the author] has called her sonar ear, her radar eye onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its and in America's core values. [The authors'] unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of our greatest writers.-Dust jacket.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 979.4 D556 Checked out 06/29/2024 33111010783344
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Fromthe bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking - In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline" ( The Baltimore Sun ), Didion-a native Californian-reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.

Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California'sethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic's often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California's romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

Originally published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

[This volume] turns what [the author] has called her sonar ear, her radar eye onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its and in America's core values. [The authors'] unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of our greatest writers.-Dust jacket.

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