The White Album

“I feel Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work.” Read more...

The Best Books of Landscape Writing

Dan Richards, Travel Writer

“With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian……She had the journalist’s access to many, many people. The book could have been anything, from celebrity worship to offbeat cool, but her deadpan observations and her staccato organisation of the facts manage to cut in between. As a distillation of the moment, it works like the movie Nashville: critically observant, fabulously detached and just a bit mesmerised and horrified by the chaos.” Read more...

The best books on Worry

Steven Amsterdam, Novelist