Where I Was From

Biography & Memoir, Literary, Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States
Cover of the book Where I Was From by Joan Didion, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Joan Didion ISBN: 9780307763297
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication: January 26, 2011
Imprint: Vintage Language: English
Author: Joan Didion
ISBN: 9780307763297
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication: January 26, 2011
Imprint: Vintage
Language: English

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.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

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.

More books from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Cover of the book The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by Joan Didion
Cover of the book It Ain't Sauce, It's Gravy by Joan Didion
Cover of the book The Revolution of Little Girls by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Daemon Voices by Joan Didion
Cover of the book The Discoveries by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Preparing for the Twenty-First Century by Joan Didion
Cover of the book De Gabo a Mario by Joan Didion
Cover of the book The Janes by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Cattle Towns by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Prisoners of War by Joan Didion
Cover of the book A Fine Balance by Joan Didion
Cover of the book Common Ground by Joan Didion
Cover of the book The Count and the Confession by Joan Didion
Cover of the book House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories by Joan Didion
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy