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Democracy
- Narrated by: Denise Poirier
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Moving deftly from Honolulu to Jakarta, between romance, farce, and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Critic reviews
"Striking, provocative, and brilliantly written." ( The Atlantic)
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Story
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.
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Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
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Run, River
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Holly Cate
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
By: Joan Didion
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Joan Didion at the 92nd Street Y
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Joseph Lelyveld
- Length: 46 mins
- Original Recording
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Joyce Carol Oates called Joan Didion "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time." Ms. Didion is the author of the novels Play It as It Lays and The Last Thing He Wanted, the essay collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and the memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking.
By: Joan Didion
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After Henry
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Hess
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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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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It'll blow a hole in your retina
- By Darwin8u on 10-03-15
By: Joan Didion
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Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- By: Joan Didion
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
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More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
By: Joan Didion
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Original Recording
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When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
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Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
By: Joan Didion
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The World According to Joan Didion
- By: Evelyn McDonnell
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she said.
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Woke, revisionist retelling of Didion's life and work.
- By c on 02-10-24
By: Evelyn McDonnell
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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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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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Ugh—find a different book
- By K. Hendry on 02-27-21
By: Joan Didion
What listeners say about Democracy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nikki D
- 01-03-24
Perfect and odd
This is an odd book that is so exactly my thing! It is a story about a family and a murder but more importantly about a relationship between a politician’s wife and a government fixer. Or maybe it’s about Vietnam. It’s not a whodunnit or whydunnit but the questions are asked. It’s about Hawaii and more.
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- Kelly
- 05-04-18
Author interruptions are odd.
This is an odd book, with a unique narration. Parts of it involve moments when the author breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, and the rest is mostly told in a peek-at-the-journal style. The writing was beautiful and the story intriguing, but the quirky story-telling style was a bit off-putting for me.
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- Adam Burke
- 04-17-23
Exquisite
In a villanelle, lines are repeated later in the poem according to a strict structure. Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" is such a poem. The repetition happens in such a way that the same phrase recurs in a new context, with a new meaning. They are difficult technical poems to write, but in Plath's poem, it becomes like the jumble of repeated off-kilter thoughts chasing each other.
Didion's novel is like that.
Didion's novel uses repetition like that.
The performance is also excellent.
There is a half-page, about two-thirds of the way through, that hit me with such clinical precision that I had to stop what I was doing and listen to it again, three times, then search the internet for the exact text so I could write it down.
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2 people found this helpful
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- A B
- 03-24-23
Mentally Taxing
I did not embrace Joan Dideon's writing style of repeating the beginnings and endings, usually the endings of sentences and usually the sentence's object. Joan Dideon's repeating of the beginnings and endings of sentences resulted in my inability to finish the Audible book I purchased. Joan Dideon's repeating of the beginnings and endings of sentences filled me with irritation. (See what I did there?) Good Lord, Joan. The entire novel? And no character development. I stuck with it up to Part 3, then gave up and removed it from my Audible library. Props to the narrator though. She did a bang-up job.
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