Didion's wide-ranging and anecdotal style takes a little getting used to, but "The White Album" essay makes it worth wading through some of the less enjoyable parts of the rest of the book. These essays--all written about her experiences and observations between 1966 and 1972--really evoke that particular time when the 1960s began to get uglier and even more narcissistic than they started. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Didion writes, and there was certainly a lot of story-telling going on in the late 1960s: on Didion's part, as she tries to make some sense of what she's seeing, and on everyone else's part, as they either tried to understand the collapse of the Flower Children's good intentions or rationalize their own bad behavior. Ask Charlie Manson or the Hell's Angels at Altamont (or the Rolling Stones who hired them).