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History. Politics. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: "Narrator David Colacci approaches this opinionated, engrossing audiobook with a practiced voice that lets its numerous stories tell themselves without fanfare...this audiobook is a monumental work." � AudioFile Magazine In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize�winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense�economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize�winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.… (more)
User reviews
First, as he makes clear in his Preface, this is neither a history of
Also, if you're worried about the length of the book, don't be. First of all, by the Kindle measurement, the body of the text ends at 73%, so barely over 700 pages make up the body of the book. While all of the notes are useful if you want to read further, very few include additional commentary (there are actually some footnotes in the text for those types of notes) so the pages with the notes do not add to the amount of reading. In addition, each chapter is centered on a particular movement and/or group of people, so each can be read almost like a self-contained essay. This makes the book one that allows a reader to read chapters at their leisure and return to the book later without losing too much of the flow. That said, it richly rewards reading over a few days so you can better appreciate the big picture.
Finally, and this is important, Menand doesn't treat the period as if in a vacuum. He discusses what came before and how it helped shape what happened during this period. Sometimes as a logical continuation, sometimes as a response to, but never as something created from nothing. If you expected a book to discuss a period of history, especially when focusing on art and thought, without delving into what came before, you haven't read many meaningful history books, at least not very well.
Because the sweep is so broad, there will be some areas where Menand uses less than nuanced interpretations when making his point. Not so much wrong or mistaken, but things that don't take everything into account. I didn't find these to be particularly problematic, a person can only go in depth so far on this many topics, at some point he has to rely on previous work. I only noticed this in a couple chapters where I have done more research and reading, and I think that will be the case with other readers for whom some of these movements represent part of their personal scholarly past. It does not, however, detract from the larger arc of the book and doesn't make a reader feel that something has been misrepresented.
I highly recommend this for readers who enjoy intellectual history, literary history, and art history. Art in this case is using the broad definition, music, painting, etc. I think a casual reader would enjoy reading this book essentially as a collection of connected essays.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.