Books, Arts & Manners: Picking Up the Pieces

Slouching Towards Bethlehem By Joan Didion Farrar, $4.95

One suspects Miss Didion was that solemn sort of child whom misguided adults try to coax into smiling. She never outgrew it entirely, to judge from these reports and meditations, all of which have to do in one way or another with Yeats’ lament that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Gathered together, her journalism forms a fragmentary chronicle of the breakings-up of society, civilization and her own world; and of her search for a niche in the rubble.

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C. H. Simonds

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem By Joan Didion Farrar, $4.95

One suspects Miss Didion was that solemn sort of child whom misguided adults try to coax into smiling. She never outgrew it entirely, to judge from these reports and meditations, all of which have to do in one way or another with Yeats’ lament that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Gathered together, her journalism forms a fragmentary chronicle of the breakings-up of society, civilization and her own world; and of her search for a niche in the rubble.