Word: didion
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During her two-week stay in EI Salvador last summer, writer Joan Didion must have gotten angry too. But she channeled this emotion productively and produced Salvador, an account of her visit to a country that is slowly being destroyed by inbred antagonisms and the misguided efforts of other nations to serve the causes of self-interest and peace at the same time Salvador is short and quickly read Yet Didion's eloquence and the tragic, almost absurd nature of her subject gives this book a weight and power that transcend the limitations imposed by the number of pages. Didion...
...difficult, even impossible, to discuss the situation in EI Salvador without expressing some sort of political viewpoint. Didion makes her own position clear, sometimes explicitly, but usually implicitly. Her unflattering portraits of rightist leaders like Robertod' Aubisson, and her constant comparisons of the Salvadoran reality she perceives with the White House's roster view demonstrate her opposition to current U.S. policy. And she mocks the notion that true progress has been made on the human rights front Indeed, she finds a language common to Washington and the Salvadoran Right that has replaced the word "change" with the word "symbol...
...drawings from celebrated fellow Colombian Fernando Botero. There are lively, offbeat articles: Gore Vidal reporting from the Gobi Desert, Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould speculating on why .400 hitters have disappeared from baseball. More predictably in a culture magazine, there are discerning reviews by Novelist Robert Stone of Joan Didion's Latin American reportage in her book Salvador, and by Staff Editor Walter demons and Los Angeles Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer of Wagnerian opera productions for film and television...
...many of the issues of the women's movement, from housework to abortion, were so basic to so much received wisdom that they seemed, by prospect or in perspective, either trivial or threatening. "Attention was finally being paid," Joan Didion wrote in a 1972 essay, "yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. ... It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman...
...many other women, without Didion's intellectual range and without her literary privilege, it is still hard to think