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Title: Salvador by Joan Didion ISBN: 0679751831 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: May, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38
Rating: 4
Summary: A still life of death
Comment: Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.
Being in El Salvador must have felt like never knowing that at any moment someone could step up from behind you and fire a bullet into your head. Could one ever get used to that? Used to bodies left every day on the side of the road? Used to them laying unclaimed because, if they were claimed, that person would be next? It really made me realize how much I take for granted living under the rule of law. Human life seems to be of such little value almost everywhere else.
The other thing Didion made me realize was that there was hope for my writing. She writes in huge, long, never-ending run-on sentences with scads of parantheticals and comma-separated interludes and explanations, as well as semicolon appendages (many whole paragraphs are only one sentence long), yet she gets away with it; there's hope for me.
Rating: 1
Summary: Salvador
Comment: I met Joan Didion the day she came to El Salvador. We talk for about one hour and though I find her a most inteligent woman, his ideas about the country and the civil war shocked me as completely fantastic, I thought that at the end of her visit, her ideas would be very different.
I was very surprised when I read her book several years ago. It was our conversation, as if it was written before she came to El Salvador. She first made her conclusions, then she came to the country to pick some anecdotes that fit them. Too bad. The book is a waste of paper and ink
Rating: 5
Summary: Perhaps Joan Didion's most important non-fictional work.
Comment: Didion's uncanny ability to use the words and mechanics of the English language to convey particular meanings is lustfully breathtaking. A fine line between the writings found inside a diary and a journalist's objective reportings, Joan Didion's _Salvador_ conveys El Salvador's civil war in ways that only she could. An outsider to the region, Didion's writings do not attempt to account for the chronological history of the civil war. Instead, she uses this diaretic format to help the reader enter into a world so foreign from the luxury-plagued U.S. that both Joan and her readers are left out of place, struggling to come to terms with the terror then reigning across El Salvador's tropical countryside--all along forcing her readers to confront the odious role played by our nation's then Vietnam Syndrome inflicted CIA. (May I also suggest the movie _Salvador_,...It is based on the diary of another freelance journalist/photographer who covered the civil war in El Salvador at the same time as Didion. These two works will move your mind and your heart, altering the way you look at the world as well as our country.)
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Title: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War by Mark Danner ISBN: 067975525X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Miami by Joan Didion ISBN: 0679781803 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374521727 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez ISBN: 0312195419 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The White Album by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374522219 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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