The Last Thing He Wanted Paperback - 1997
by Joan Didion
Creating a "menacing world where the reader is held hostage" ("Los Angeles Times"), the legendary author of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" now trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy--Dallas, 1963; Iran Contra in 1984--and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.
From the jacket flap
This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didion's incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up.
The narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. Suddenly walking off the 1984 campaign, she finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon. She becomes embroiled in her Dick's business though "she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined, something that includes Ambassador-at-Large Treat Austin Morrison and Alexander Brokaw, the ambassador to an unnamed Caribbean island.
Into this startling vision of conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations, Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points up how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. This is our system, the one "trying to create a context for democracy and getting [its] hands a little dirty in the process."
"From the Hardcover edition.
Details
- Title The Last Thing He Wanted
- Author Joan Didion
- Binding Paperback
- Edition Reprint
- Pages 240
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Vintage, New York
- Date 1997-09-02
- ISBN 9780679752851 / 0679752854
- Weight 0.52 lbs (0.24 kg)
- Dimensions 7.9 x 5 x 0.8 in (20.07 x 12.70 x 2.03 cm)
- Reading level 1140
-
Themes
- Sex & Gender: Feminine
- Library of Congress subjects Political fiction, Women journalists
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Media reviews
Citations
- New York Times, 11/09/1997, Page 36
- NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 01/01/1997, Page 97
- Publishers Weekly, 08/18/1997, Page 0
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