Overview
āAn engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one.ā āCarlos Lozada, The Washington Post
āThe Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high.ā āDavid Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review
Named a most anticipated book of April by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Oprah Daily
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prizeāwinning 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 senseāeconomic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prizeāwinning 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 āfreedomā 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 Arendtās Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cageās residencies at North Carolinaās 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 Ginsbergās friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwinās transformation into a Civil Rights spokesman, Susan Sontagās 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 Americaās once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
This book title, The Free World (Art and Thought in the Cold War) - 9781250829641, ISBN: 9781250829641, by Louis Menand, published by Picador (February 15, 2022) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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