After Henry

Displaying the same uncanny gifts for observation, portraiture, and understanding that marked her two prior celebrated essay collections—Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album—Joan Didion takes us inside the overlapping worlds of American politics and media during the 1980s, her focus the defining narratives and image-making during the Reagan presidency and 1988 presidential race. Elsewhere, Didion, a Berkeley alumnus, chronicles return visits to campus in the 70s and 80s, weaving together memories of her undergraduate years and "Atomic Age" childhood, interviewing nuclear scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and reflecting brilliantly on kidnapped California heiress Patty Hearst, a student at Berkeley when apprehended by radical leftists.

"Fire season" in Southern California. The Cotton Club murder trial, a real-life L.A. noir with roles played by a top movie producer, a porn tycoon, and Columbian drug-cartel contacts. In "Times Mirror Square," she tracks the stories and agendas of the men who built the Los Angeles Times, a prime shaper of Los Angeles for a century-plus. In the searing New York-set closing essay "Sentimental Journeys," she lays bare the racial and class biases, the political and media strategies framing the narratives surrounding the Central Park jogger case.

Download this first-ever digital edition of After Henry (named for her longtime editor Henry Robbins) and see why The New York Times, reviewing the book in 1992, declared, "Didion has captured the mood of America."