NATIONAL BESTSELLER - One of contemporary literature s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country s culture and history feel particularly resonant today. --Harper s Bazaar Joan Didion the bestselling award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean has always kept notebooks--of overheard dialogue interviews drafts of essays copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. Notes on the South traces a road trip that she and her husband John Gregory Dunne took through Louisiana Mississippi and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through her interviews with local figures and their preoccupation with race class and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. California Notes began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion s signature irony and imagination in play we re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.