JOAN DIDION, CONTRARIAN

Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015) ("Didion still believed what she had thought when she was a student at Berkeley in the fifties: Humanity's problems were not political, nor could they be solved by political action. The problem was the intractable human heart." Id. at 177. "Didion: The 'critical reading faculty' in this country 'atrophied' around the time Reagan took office. She said this was not a coincidence." Id. at 419. "Given both major parties' crass appeals to the rabid fringes of their bases, their attempts to limit the actual number of voters in play and to corral them in gerrymandered districts, 'choice' was a political fable. Only 'sentimentally does "the vote" give "the voter" an empathetic listener in the political class, let alone any leverage on the workings of that class,' dominated it is by vast wealth and armies of lobbyists." Id. at 506. Also, see Michiko Kakutani, "A Brilliant Writer (and a Brand) Examined in a Biography," NYT, The Arts, Books of the Times, Tuesday, 8/18.2015; and Sasha Weiss, "Coast to Coast," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/13/2015.).