The best picture of 1960s and 1970s California I’ve come across. This is a fantastic collection of essays about John Wayne, the Haight-Ashbury, Joan Baez, the Black Panthers, etc., written with an uncommon genius and a striking self-knowledge. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Joan Didion is weird and she knows it, and that makes her all the more pro. I apologize for the dippiness of those last two sentences, but I think they’re true.