Political Fictions
by Joan Didion
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Editions of Political Fictions
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Paperback |
Publisher Vintage Books |
Date 2002 |
Price $1.00 |
 Used, Very Good |
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Hardcover |
Publisher Random House Inc |
Date 2001 |
Price $1.00 |
Good |
Publisher Notes
In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation’s citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by—and for—“that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” The eight pieces collected here from The New York Review build, one on the other, to a stunning whole, a portrait of the American political landscape that tells us, devastatingly, how we got where we are today.
In Political Fictions, tracing the dreamwork that was already clear at the time of the first Bush ascendance in 1988, Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation’s deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated in this process, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 election. In this book Didion cuts to the core of the deceptions and deflections to explain and illuminate what came to be called “the disconnect”—and to reveal a political class increasingly intolerant of the nation that sustains it.
Joan Didion’s profound understanding of America’s political and cultural terrain, her sense of historical irony, and the play of her imagination make Political Fictions a disturbing and brilliant tour de force.
Media Reviews
"Didon's whole career has been a disenchantment, from which her pages fall like brilliant autumn leaves and arrange themselves as sermons in the stones....Didion [is] crouched like a desert lioness, a tawny Sphinx, on the fault lines of our culture, alert to every shiver of tectonic plates....But the policy wonks will want to know, where are her remedies, her five-year plan, her I.P.O.? Not her job."
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