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...

"It'll blow a hole in your retina" -- Joan Didion, "Pacific Distances" in 'After Henry' "Writers are only rarely likable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent..." -- Joan Didion, 'After Henry'Joan Didion is a prose knife fighter. God love whoever/whatever finds their slow side trapped in a corner, facing the pointy end of Didion's prose. She is especially talented in writing about place (especi...

Here is an older (50ish to 60ish), wiser and denser Joan Didion, really buckling down on the biggies: politics, especially, but also society and even race. "After Henry" is bookended by two of my favorite Didion pieces: The opening essay meaningfully explores the relationship between a writer and her editor; it's about where to go and how to write when your favorite editor is no longer there to catch you when you fall. "Sentimental Journeys," the last essay in "After Henry," is a reported analys...

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.

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 th...

As we gear up for another season of Who's Going to be President, the essays here on politics are evermore poignant. And yet, who will read them that doesn't already agree? Didion's biggest weakness might be her perpetual lot of a saint preaching to the choir.The essay "LA Noir" manages to be more interesting, mysterious, and entertaining than all of True Detective season 2 by about a million x. Good non-fiction is better than almost all fiction.Didion can write journalistic pieces with a novelis...

Joan REALLY doesn't like NYC.

Joan Didion is armed with a particular kind of x-ray vision — one that cuts through appearances, never fooled by the words being said or the explanation being given. It takes a certain breed of person, perhaps one that has been taught to distrust nearly everything and everyone, to bring the charismatic indifference and rigor she does to her political and cultural commentary.After Henry is a worthwhile read, but much more focused on American politics and history than her other collections of non-...

I received this book from NetGalley. I picked it because Joan Didion is on my book club list (The Year of Magical Thinking).There were parts of this book that I really enjoyed - the California section and the New York section especially. I learned facts about each that I was not previously aware. The California section particularly because I lived outside Los Angeles for 28 years and remember a lot of what the author was writing about. The thing that bothered me about this book was that I had to...

Sometimes laborious. Sometimes fascinating. Often too outside my wheelhouse to be personally meaningful. Still, a great look at events and politics that shaped my late childhood and early adult years.

Contains some of the authors longer and denser works. prolly why it took 3 weeks to read. emphasized (or exacerbated depending on readers taste) some of her writerly tendencies. Also hit on many of her familiar themes (geographic psychologies of California, New York). My fav bits were her observations on news media, in the form of covering both specific events like pres election cycles and specific institutions like the LA times or NY papers. My other favorite part about reading Didion besides t...

I love Joan Didion and these are a mix of her essays from the late 80's / early 90's and are split between pieces on politics, LA, and then one on New York. Of course, given the dates some are just well, at this point, do I care (does anyone?) about the LA mayoral race in 1988? On the other hand, the distance of time makes some strike all the more. Her last essay on New York focuses on the case of the Central Park jogger and given what we now know, that the 'Central Park 5' were all actually inn...

Hmm. Not grabbing me the way all of her other books have. Too political, too journalistic, too uninvolving? Even the Patty Hearst essay seemed more of an exercise/assignment. I’m sure there are good bits, but I am not digging out as many as I’d like. Some other day.

"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.

Just when you thought this country was reaching its breaking point, Joan Didion reminds you that America has always been totally fried.

Didion continues to write essays with a strength and level of connection few can match in this collection. With much of the collection being centered around California this book might not have the same cross cultural appeal as some of her earlier writings. That point may be silly however, cross cultural appeal is not a phrase that comes easily to mind when speaking of Joan Didion. In " The Realm of the Fisher " Didion focuses primarily on Nancy Reagan both in and out of The White House. No matte...

Though a few of the subjects are dated (in particular the clueless entitlement of the Reagans, the venality of GHW Bush, all their staff and hangers-on), the incisiveness, the insight, the craft, the writing are so strong that made little difference to me. The "Pacific Distances" and much of the "Los Angeles" sections are timeless. Didion's press criticism (in the first section, she zeroes in on the way that media's limited capacity for complexity dilutes the electoral process, how coverage beco...

The first Didion collection of essays I've read where I felt some of the pieces were were just mediocre, but there's excellent ones as well, particularly 'Girl of the Gold West', about Patty Hearst, and 'Times Mirror Square', about how Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler basically willed Los Angeles into existence (blended with the history of the Los Angeles Times newspaper). The 'Pacific Distances' essay was a little too disconnected, but portions of it were brilliant, particul...

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...

I think the remainder bookstore where I bought this some years ago had it on the fiction shelf, so when I finally got around to it I was expecting another tightly strung Didion novel. Instead, it’s a collection of articles on the usual subjects: politics, culture, society, money, power, etc, etc, mostly set in LA, with some Washington and New York thrown in, from the ‘80s (so a bit dated, except maybe for where the name “Trump” could substitute for “Reagan” in some passages on an “outsider” admi...

Joan Didion can write about how the glue used in phone books in the 60's was developed and she'll find an interesting angle, an interesting way to make it relevant. She'll find a poignant element and flesh out the rest of the essay, coloring it with the time period and the people populated by it. Her voice is so urbane and refined that sometimes reaching her more caustic points and observations is like swallowing needles in honey. While I didn't enjoy this collection as much as others, I do feel...

There's not much I can say about Joan Didion. Just read her. Start with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and continue from there. Skip around if you want, but make sure you read the essays "In the Islands" and "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream", and as much of Salvador and Miami as you can. I can't imagine you'll be sorry!

Didion writes with a clarity and grace usually found only in pure mountain spring water. These essays are a delight.

Didion's most California-centric and boring collection I've come across. There are still a few great essays in here.

There’s no other storyteller like Joan Didion. She can take the most boring fact and spin a narrative yarn around it that boggles the mind. She can tie so many elements together in telling a story and making a point about politics, culture, or the identity of a place that reading her essays feels like being schooled in an art. In this collection, she even manages to make topics like Hawaiian real estate of decades gone by interesting.The titular Henry was Didion’s longtime trusted and beloved ed...

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

I love Didion, but this book is definitely her least essential collection of essays (of the ones I've read). You can even tell from the title: Henry was her editor, and these are the essays she wrote after he died. They aren't so much a positive accomplishment as they are a "Well, might as well keep writing."Didion's other books of essays (or "higher journalism," although I don't like that word) are more focused in place and time, and have a tighter thematic unity. This book is divided into sect...

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 tribu...

I think I'm officially an adult now, giving 4 stars to a collected non-fiction crosses some kind of threshold.I. After HenryWhat a smart way to start this collection and hook me from the start. I really had no clue who Joan Didion was or what to expect from her and I definitely had no idea who Henry Robbins was but I wish I had. This was a moving and eloquently written tribute.II. Washington-In the Realm of the Fisher KingI was pretty young during the Reagan era. This article was informative and...

Caveat for the three-star rating; There were two essays within the book I would rate as five-star, but there were several hyper-specific essays of which the topics weren't interesting enough for me to enjoy (the one about the Los Angeles Times might not even be interesting if you lived in LA it was so detail-oriented). That being said, the essay "In the Realm of the Fisher King" about Ronald Reagan was intriguing. The focus on Reagan as an actor, and Nancy Reagan's mannerisms and social etiquett...