Shelf Traveler: review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

1. Shelf Traveler: review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
   review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
   
   
   
   
   
   
   ~A collection of essays and journalistic pieces - primarily spotlighting San Francisco in the 60’s - on the self and one’s place in a society that seems to be sinking head-first into a fast future~
   
   I give it: 8/10
   
   Length: 238 pages
   
   
   
   Reading Joan Didion’s literary journalism is like closing your eyes and listening to waves crash; the rhythm has been naturally perfected, the process helps clear your conscience, and the momentum of the moment keeps you content.
   
   Didion’s depiction of California’s captivating counterculture made this book a compatible partner-in-crime for my San Francisco trip.
   
   The essay I enjoyed most out of the collection, "Where the Kissing Never Stops" characterizes the controversy surrounding Joan Baez - “the pawn of the protest movement” - and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, a school for peaceful thinking and reflection.
   
   
   Four days a week, MIss Baez and her fifteen students meet for lunch … After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor and discuss their reading: Ghandi on Nonviolence, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom, Huxley’s Ends and Means and MclUhan's Understanding the Media.
   
   On the fifth day they meet as usual but spend the afternoon in total silence, which involves not only not talking, but also not reading, not writing, and not smoking.
   
   Didion emphasizes that Baez’s folk music career (alongside Bob Dylan) was never about the money or recognition, or even the music, but rather connecting to other people - and that politics were directly linked to Baez’s emotions.
   
   “Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes.”
   
   
   
   Baez half- jokes that, “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger.”
   
   "I’m not an optimist, darling, but I’m hopeful. There’s a difference.“
   
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