
Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a masterful collection of articles and essays. This slim volume is essential reading for anyone that wants a better understanding of late-60s America.
The book starts with magazine articles ranging in topic from a murder case to Joan Baez's school forteaching nonviolence. The events and settings are all there, but so is a human element. Baez is not just a naive hippie, she is a victim of her ability to see the world like a child.
Personal essays follow the articles, and surpass them in quality. Didion explores the attitude of exclusion prevelant in the Sacremento Valley of the 1960s. She also writes beautifully about her eight years in New York.
My favorite essay is entitled "On Self-Respect." The piece is short, but powerful.
The book's centerpiece is the title article. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is easily the best article about the hippie movement I have ever read. The hippie lifestyle is not demonized, but it's not glorified, either. Through interviews, Didion shows that many hippies were just lost kids, and had no idea that they had started something that had political undertones.
Didion's attitude towards her subjects is one of respect, which ends up getting her more access. She says a little about this access in the preface: "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests."







