#15 in Essays
The White Album
- 222
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The White Album” is Joan Didion’s piercing, personal record of late-1960s California, mixing memoir, criticism and reporting. More than a survey of the counterculture, it portrays a writer unsettled by the world around her. Some readers find a few essays slow but single out the title essay and the Hollywood pieces; others miss the context behind names and events she took as familiar. It rewards anyone curious about that era.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion. Like her previous book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early 70s. With the publication of The White Album, Didion established herself as a prominent writer on Californian culture. As critic Michiko Kakutani stated, "California belongs to Joan Didion."
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 82 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 36% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Essays average of 8.0. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 82 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is The White Album?
It has 222 pages — shorter than 54% of the ranked books in Essays.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Essays — with scores between 7.7 and 8.2, closest to this book.
