Golden Grouse

Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 338 pp., $25)

Getting a hold on Joan Didion, the essayist and novelist, is tricky. She’s someone who as a high-school girl in central California “on the whole . . . preferred to spend time” with people who “hung out in gas stations.” This she states on the first page of the first of the essays in this book. On the other hand, she writes mainly for The New York Review of Books, from which these essays about the last four presidential elections are collected, and sees the world much as do the bulk of its readers. You won’t find the NYRB on sale in any gas-station magazine racks.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 338 pp., $25)

Getting a hold on Joan Didion, the essayist and novelist, is tricky. She’s someone who as a high-school girl in central California “on the whole . . . preferred to spend time” with people who “hung out in gas stations.” This she states on the first page of the first of the essays in this book. On the other hand, she writes mainly for The New York Review of Books, from which these essays about the last four presidential elections are collected, and sees the world much as do the bulk of its readers. You won’t find the NYRB on sale in any gas-station magazine racks.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.