The Last Thing He Wanted

Literature & Fiction

JOAN DIDION

Contemporary

The Franklin Library

It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island ninety miles to the south. As Didion follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence.

Miami

Travel

United States

Flamingo

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Reference

Sentimental Journeys book paperback by Joan Didion

Sentimental Journeys

This collection of essays takes the reader on a psychological tour of the intense, wayward, violent, not a little crazy America of the 1960s. Surfers, students, deadheads and druggies; Joan Baez, Dean Martin, Howard Hughes and John Wayne - all emerge from Didion's gaze just that little bit weirder, that little bit more American. Joan Didion has also written "Sentimental Journeys" and "The White Album".

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America. In this moving and surprising book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history -- and America's. Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. Didion examines 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. Joan Didion's 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 America's greatest writers.

Where I Was from

Biographies & Memoirs

Harper Perennial; New Ed edition (6 Sept. 2004)

In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Where I Was From, in Didion’s words, “represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.” The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue.In Where I Was From, Didion turns what John Leonard 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.Joan Didion’s 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.

Where I Was From

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. The Year of Magical Thinking will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.

The Year Of Magical Thinking

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Fourth Estate

`This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you...' In this adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir, Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play. The first production of `The Year of Magical Thinking', starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare, was a runaway hit on Broadway in 2007. The same production is transferring to the National Theatre from April to July 2008.

The Year of Magical Thinking Playscript. Joan Didion

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

The Year of Magical Thinking

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by JOAN DIDION. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by JOAN DIDION

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by JOAN DIDION. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Thing He Wanted

Miami

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Sentimental Journeys

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Where I Was from

Where I Was From

The Year Of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking Playscript. Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking