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A Book of Common Prayer
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Snakes and cracks everywhere
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First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
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Blue Nights
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Extremely moving memoir, well-narrated
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,886
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
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Where I Was From
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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4 out of 5 stars
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
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Democracy
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Denise Poirier
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 20
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Story4 out of 5 stars 20
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Author interruptions are odd.
- By Kelly on 05-04-18
-
Play It As It Lays
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 268
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 239
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Story4 out of 5 stars 238
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Snakes and cracks everywhere
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
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The White Album
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 467
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 412
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 416
First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Time Capsule of a Bygone Age
- By Ian C Robertson on 10-21-15
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Blue Nights
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 352
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 309
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 311
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Extremely moving memoir, well-narrated
- By Doggy Bird on 12-16-11
-
The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,886
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,832
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 1,848
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 86
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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4 out of 5 stars
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- By: Joan Didion
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- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,034
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 951
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Story4 out of 5 stars 939
Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Didion deserves better.
- By Victoria Wright on 01-21-13
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The Last Thing He Wanted
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 15
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 13
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 12
Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.
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Uncanny Valley
- A Memoir
- By: Anna Wiener
- Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4 out of 5 stars 37
In her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener - stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial - left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. The prescient account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital age.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Could have been better
- By R. Herz on 01-20-20
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After Henry
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Hess
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 16
In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.
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4 out of 5 stars
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It'll blow a hole in your retina
- By Darwin8u on 10-03-15
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Run, River
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Holly Cate
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 22
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 21
Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
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Thalia Book Club: Joan Didion's Blue Nights
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion
- Length: 1 hr
- Original Recording
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 12
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 10
Didion discusses her deeply moving new memoir about her daughter, and her own fears and thoughts about growing old, in her first book since the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking. As with that memoir, in her new one Didion confides and confronts her fears, frailties, and sorrows about her life as she looks back and forward. In conversation with her nephew Griffin Dunne ( After Hours).
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Miami
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 28
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4 out of 5 stars 25
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.
- By Darwin8u on 09-22-15
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The Topeka School
- A Novel
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Nancy Linari, Peter Berkrot, Tristan Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 216
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 189
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Story4 out of 5 stars 188
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Strong novel about 1990s
- By citizen, jazzmania on 01-11-20
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South and West
- From a Notebook
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Nathaniel Rich
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
Joan Didion has always kept notebooks - of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and articles - and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
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3 out of 5 stars
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"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
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Salvador
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 2 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4 out of 5 stars 38
The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Didion writes like an orthopedic surgeon cuts
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
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How to Do Nothing
- Resisting the Attention Economy
- By: Jenny Odell
- Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 129
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 119
Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity...doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Our attention is the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and find more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
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5 out of 5 stars
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great book, voiceover is brutal
- By Anonymous User on 08-24-19
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Bark
- Stories
- By: Lorrie Moore
- Narrated by: Lorrie Moore
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 147
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 129
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Story4 out of 5 stars 129
In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom...Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud - the hallmark of Lorrie Moore - land.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Enjoyable, intriguing short story collection
- By CGJ on 01-04-15
Publisher's Summary
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil.
A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
Critic Reviews
"A novelist with important things to say about the dislocations of our time.... Joan Didion is stellar." ( Newsday)
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- A reader in Berkeley
- 06-04-17
Strong tale badly told
This narrator reads Charlotte Douglas' voice like a child's, and she is not a child. Think how much more mysterious she would be if allowed to sound like the strong, sensual, grownup, maternal character she is.
2 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Julie Shaffer
- 12-23-19
Dreadful narrative ruins an otherwise great story
While the words, the language, the actual story in Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer is marvelous, you'd never know that if you had not read the story before listening to this audio version. This narration by Marisa Vitali's sounds absolutely robotic; very close to some of the audio stories that are available free from the Gutenberg Project that are, I believe, actually recorded using some sort of "read out loud" software. It is so bad, it's like a 6th grade girl who thinks she's doing a bang-up job reading out loud to the class, but she pauses in odd places and seems to often confuse the end of a line with the end of a sentence. Almost never is the emphasis on the right word. I've purchases many, many Audible books and count on them to feature top-notch talent. Most do, but this is the rare (so far) exception. If you want to enjoy, or even really understand this book, do NOT listen to this version - it will kill the story for you.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- NFH
- 06-28-18
Meh...
Found the plot boring. Only finished the book so I could talk about it at book club.