Essays about Los Angeles -- the city's culture, its landscape, its politics, its Hollywood glamour and that glamour's dark antithesis, its tourists, its surrounding areas. Most particularly, the 60's in Los Angeles and that decade's aftermath. Didion trains her eye on the ineffable and the glaringly obvious with equal style and brutal, refreshing honesty.
— Sarah G.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.