DeDion Reviews

I'm not sure why this essay from The New York Review of Books of January 16, 2003 was made into a book. It's more like a pamphlet, and a short one at that. Of course Joan Didion is an icon of the American left and a prose stylist deluxe as well as a trenchant social and political critic. Perhaps what Didion has to say is of great importance and perhaps she says it very well. Clearly the unstated assumption of the essay--that we would in fact bring about a regime change in Iraq (that is, we would invade Iraq) has proven prescient.

Didion's essay is in three parts. The first part is mostly an observation on how the Bush administration is attempting to preempt criticism of its policies by labeling critics as somehow unpatriotic or worse. One of the nice points she makes is that the "war on terror" is a misnomer since terror is not a state but a technique. (p. 8)

In the second part she identifies the first "fixed idea." She is talking about the government of Israel. She writes, "Whether the actions taken by that government constitute self-defense or a particularly inclusive form of self-immolation remains an open question." She goes on to say that almost no one in the US dare challenge the fixed idea that we must support the actions of the Israeli government. She says that the question is seldom discussed rationally or at all (in her circle, it would seem) because "few of us are willing to see our evenings turn toxic." ( p. 23) That she herself has to bury this assertion into the very middle of her essay and to express it so obliquely reinforces her point perhaps more strongly than she might have imagined.

In the third part she reveals the second fixed idea, which she identifies as the "theory" behind the "regime change in Iraq" pronouncements made in 2002 by President Bush. "I made up my mind [the President had said in April] that Saddam needs to go." (p. 36) The "theory" that Didion is talking about is sometimes called "The Bush Doctrine" or "The New American Unilateralism" or more bluntly, "The American Empire." The second fixed idea then is that "with the collapse of the Soviet Union" we have an opportunity and an obligation to move unilaterally and preemptively against our enemies as an imperial power might.

I'm not going to evaluate Didion's argument here--that is something you will want to do yourself--except to say that:

1) In reference to the rather high-handed attempt at managing the press and public opinion by the Bush administration, had the Democrats been in the White House post 9/11 they would have done something similar.

2) The actions of Hamas and the other Palestinian suicide/murder organizations make it difficult to take any side other than Israel's. If the Palestinian people had better leadership that would pursue their goals in the spirit and manner of, say, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., they would find widespread (although not majority) support in the US; indeed, I believe, given world opinion, they would be successful.

3) Yes, we are indeed seeing the emergence of an American Empire. Whether we will have the wisdom to use our power so that we do not go the way of Rome in a relatively quick manner will depend on our ability to work with other nations for the betterment of the entire planet. This is something the Bush administration is not doing very well, but there is hope that the next administration will be wiser.

What has happened to freedom of speech in America? Why are we not publicly and openly debating the self-serving and undeomocratic policies of the Bush administration? Didion, in another fine essay on American life, asks these questions and tries to answer them. This is a fine book for anyone who worries about our nation proceeding out of control in its war for oil and corporate interests. Didion is clear in her concerns about why we have lost our powers of free speech and citizenship. A must read for anyone who cares about this nation.

I was disappointed by the 86 images of nudes, fashion shots, and portraits in this book. Although they are technically wonderful, well-lit, and beautiful, they lack a good grasp of the inner reality of the subjects. The contrast between this book and his remarkable work in Lady: Lisa Lyon and Flowers could not have been greater.

This book contains modest nudity of the sort that would require an R rating for a motion picture. None of the challenging images that made Mr. Mapplethorpe famous are present here.

In the annotation by Joan Dideon, Mr. Mapplethorpe is quoted as saying "You don't know why it's happening, but it's happening." Too little was happening in most of these images. The exceptions were the girls, who clearly expressed their personalities in an unguarded way. Most of the models are "well known, figures of considerable celebrity or fashion or achievement." As such, "they are professional women, performers before the camera." I think that as such, they were able to show just what they wished to reveal about themselves. So you get a mask, rather than a person. Mr. Mapplethorpe says about himself that his work is "very symmetrical." I agree, and while that works well with his flower portraits (in Flowers) that symmetry just seems a little dull here to me. Ms. Dideon also points out that "the idealization here is never of the present." Certainly, you will see that he is inspired by classical Greek and Roman ideas of female beauty.

Here are my favorites: Lydia Cheng, 1985; Sonia Resika, 1988 (p. 18); Brit Hammer, 1988; Lara Harris, 1987 (p. 27); Isabella Rossellini, 1988 (p. 33); Caroline Herrera, 1988; Alexandra Ellis, 1988; Blake Finkelson, 1988; Eva Amurri, 1988 (p. 58); Susan Sarandon and Eva Amurri, 1988; Brooke Shields, 1988 (p. 73); Stella Goodall, 1984; Diandre Douglas, 1988; and Dolphine Neil-Jones, 1987.

As you can see the timing of these images is very similar, so you get a compressed sense of female beauty reflecting a moment in history. In a way, it's like a candid snapshot of beauty, rather than a cultural panorama.

After you finish this book, think about another thing Mr. Mapplethorpe said, "I'm looking for the unexpected." Where can you find and use the unexpected to expand your vision?

Stretch to the limits of imagination, rather than being bound by the vanity of the ego.

Though controversial and best known for his erotic photography of male nudes, Some Women shows the depth and resounding mastery of Mapplethorpe's creativity and artistic talent. This is a compilation of B&W photographs of women of all ages: children through seniors. Some are fashion models, nude torsos, others unknown friends, some famous actresses (including: Sigourney Weaver, Susan Sarandon, Melanie Griffith, Dianne Weist, Grace Jones and Kathleen Turner to name a few.) Each photographic plate is resoundly crafted and displayed highlighting the complex and compelling beauty of women.

Joan Didion is one of America's most gifted writers, and "After Henry" is no exception. Though at times her prose is lax, it is mostly pure and simple. "After Henry" is the perfect book of thoughts, essays for a rainy, Sunday afternoon. It is one of Didion's most heartfelt triumphs. Good

As a longtime Didion fan I was mildly disappointed with this text. It's cumbersome, swishy, and sloppy. It hints at phrases, and the sort of language she eventually uses later in her writing, but this early novel is exactly that...early. It shows promise, and is not entirely without wit, but it's weak and cumbersome plot, it's overwrought prose, and it's harlequin voice were a disappointment given her profound later works.

This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: but the heirs live on and the Californian sun and hills, rivers and floods, carry on- the part of eternity we can know a little of. I liked this book very much, but the reader should be warned it is not a light read and not written as completely in Joan Didion's famously sharp style as her later works.

...but Run River is her finest novel. "Democracy" is excellent, but it is more a tour de force than a novel. Didion was only in her twenties when she wrote Run River, and it is a winner--stylish but never mannered (something you can't say about her subsequent novels), subdued, witty, assured, and filled with Valley (as in the Sacramento Valley) characters with whom Didion was rather obsessively in love. It is a pity that she seems more interested these days in writing about Washington insiders for N.Y.C./L.A. insiders. Everett McClellan, my favorite character in the book, would not have been able to sustain an interest in such figures as Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr. That Didion can--even if only for the purpose of eviscerating them--is an indication of how far she has strayed from her literary roots. Ah, but what roots they were. Run River is an extraordinary achievement.

I met Joan Didion the day she came to El Salvador. We talk for about one hour and though I find her a most inteligent woman, his ideas about the country and the civil war shocked me as completely fantastic, I thought that at the end of her visit, her ideas would be very different.
I was very surprised when I read her book several years ago. It was our conversation, as if it was written before she came to El Salvador. She first made her conclusions, then she came to the country to pick some anecdotes that fit them. Too bad. The book is a waste of paper and ink

Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.

Being in El Salvador must have felt like never knowing that at any moment someone could step up from behind you and fire a bullet into your head. Could one ever get used to that? Used to bodies left every day on the side of the road? Used to them laying unclaimed because, if they were claimed, that person would be next? It really made me realize how much I take for granted living under the rule of law. Human life seems to be of such little value almost everywhere else.

The other thing Didion made me realize was that there was hope for my writing. She writes in huge, long, never-ending run-on sentences with scads of parantheticals and comma-separated interludes and explanations, as well as semicolon appendages (many whole paragraphs are only one sentence long), yet she gets away with it; there's hope for me.

Didion's uncanny ability to use the words and mechanics of the English language to convey particular meanings is lustfully breathtaking. A fine line between the writings found inside a diary and a journalist's objective reportings, Joan Didion's _Salvador_ conveys El Salvador's civil war in ways that only she could. An outsider to the region, Didion's writings do not attempt to account for the chronological history of the civil war. Instead, she uses this diaretic format to help the reader enter into a world so foreign from the luxury-plagued U.S. that both Joan and her readers are left out of place, struggling to come to terms with the terror then reigning across El Salvador's tropical countryside--all along forcing her readers to confront the odious role played by our nation's then Vietnam Syndrome inflicted CIA. (May I also suggest the movie _Salvador_,...It is based on the diary of another freelance journalist/photographer who covered the civil war in El Salvador at the same time as Didion. These two works will move your mind and your heart, altering the way you look at the world as well as our country.)

This book has a great story to tell, but through the stalling and back-telling the powerfulness of the message is lost. I found that I had to force myself to finish hoping to be swept away by the ending, but was instead left wondering what I had missed. The narrative is confusing and lacks any passion on the subject at hand. However I believe this could be an intriguing movie.

This book was absolutely not good! It never made any sense and skipped around that by the time it got back to a certain person, you had already forgotten who they were and why they were significant! I just read a review and they said it was a romeo and juliet book, i had no idea the main character was even in love, much less there was a second main character! If you have nothing to do for days, and time to write down every character and their significance, read this book, otherwise, really don't waste your time!

Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted is a mysterious, gentle little book that ultimately is quite sad. Elena McMahon does a favour for her father and through that favour and through her we see the large unfathomable world of conspiraces and esponiage boiled to very human elements. There is a cold spareness to the writing that left this reader unmoved until after it was over and then the sadness powerfully washed over me. It is an unique and haunting look at the choices people make and the lives and events that one can affect with simple, irrevocable gestures. A beautiful novel.

No historian of the 20th century will need the comments in this book. They are regional (real estate speculation in California, the 'classes' in California), or local (New York newspaper reports on murders), and out of date (the lower middle class background of the Reagans, the electoral contest Dukakis-Bush).
The author plays not in the same league as a Simon Leys (about China) or a Ian Buruma (about Asia).

Henry Robbins was a New York editor. He died in 1979. There was a memorial service for him at the Society of Ethical Culture. He was hurt when his authors got bad reviews. The editor gives the writer the idea of himself.

Joan Didion writes of the expectation the Ronald Reagans had that other people would take care of their needs. A presidential campaign is a set. It is moved at considerable expense from location to location. A campaign can be an isolating experience. Didion is hilarious about ball-playing on the tarmac.

We learn of the generations of Hearsts preceding Patricia Campbell Hearst. The original Wyntoon was a creation of the architect Bernard Maybeck. It burned down. Patty attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park. Patricia Hearst wrote of her experience of being kidnapped. Life with the SLA had the distorted logic of dreams.

Living in Los Angeles requires the driving of great distances. There is an absence of narrative. Didion decides that narrative is sentimental anyway.

Joan Didion describes Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong. The residents of the camps put their lives on hold waiting for the consular interview, hoping to achieve relocation.

In California movies are the industry. It is believed that writers can always be replaced.

Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and its owners. To oppose the Chandlers was to oppose the perfection of Los Angeles.