In this latest foray into the ailing American psyche, Joan Didion takes her scalpel to inauthenticity and dogma, and lays bare the discrepancies between urban realities and the images peddled by America's attendant quack doctors. Like its great predecessors, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album', 'Sentimental Journeys' is a thoroughly astringent, bracing report on the State of the Union.
I could die reading Joan Didion. It would be the perfect way to go - slipping effortlessly into the deep, dark spiral of the long goodbye while gorging on the unimprovable sentences with which she constructs her narratives.
MICHAEL THOMPSON-NOEL, 'Financial Times'
Joan Didion is, for my money, America's premier literary essayist. She possesses more heart and muscle than either Updike or Vidal, and invokes more emotional resonance than Sontag. With uniform grace and vigorous attention, she writes about Big Physics, earthquakes, a sensational Hollywood murder trial, real estate on Oahu, and the history of LA mayoral politics.
SCOTT BRADFIELD, 'TES'
Didion seems by temperament drawn to the mind's inaccessible places. Readers of Didion know about dread and anxiety; they gain a slant on the bizarreries in human nature; learn to analyse the seemingly incomprehensible steps that lead to murder. There is no place here for easy morality. But then Didion writes, not from a position of knowledge, but the need to understand.
FRANCES SPALDING, 'Sunday Times'
Didion looks straight into a place where most of us have a blind spot, and it is that quality, so easy to praise, so difficult to imitate, that transmutes her writings into valuable, as well as sentimental, journeys... a voice we cannot afford to lose.
NATASHA WALTER, 'Independent'
'Sentimental Journeys' is a book about loss; of life, of quality, of integrity, innocence, purpose, ambition, a sense of community and belonging. It is about America now.
ALAN TAYLOR, 'Scotsman'
Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.