Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Written before she became a major figure, Joan Didion's first nonfiction book remains the essential portrait of America in the sixties, focusing on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and especially the essence of San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.