Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, is simply one of the very best chroniclers of America and all of its craziness, hope, promise, and destructive acts.

She graduated from Berkeley and began writing at Vogue at a very young age.  Moving from her native California to New York City, back to Hollywood and then Malibu, Honolulu, and then NYC again, she observed and wrote trenchant, beautifully crafted commentaries on the 1960’s and ’70’s before turning her perceptive eye to politics in the New York Review of Books.

This collection of essays written between 1968-1978 is a near-perfect example of what the essay form does best–allowing the writer to figure out what they think and to try out different approaches to issues.  In California, Didion explores the headline-grabbing stories—-the Manson murders, the murder of silent screen actor Vincente Navarro, the Black Panthers with Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the Doors and the rock music scene. She also dives into contemporary stories of broader interest—-water and traffic management, Hoover Dam, the women’s movement, Georgia O’Keeffe and Doris Lessing.  Perhaps the most cogent essay is one in which she’s on her first book tour and must keep responding to the question, “Where are we headed”, a question that gets asked over and over today.

Underneath all of this reporting are some of the best sentences I’ve read in quite a while.  Long lists of things or people alternate with wonderful paragraphs and pages of brilliant prose. She writes with the eye of a brilliant observer and the tight prose of a Hemingway.  If I started to quote some of her best sentences, this review would go on for pages, but here’s a brief look at the beauty and clarity of her writing: “Most of  us live less theatrically, but remain survivors of a peculiar and inward time.  If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

Times like this filled with trump, cruz, hawley, mccarthy, and Fox News cry out for Didion’s sharp eye and sharper pen.  She will be missed.