The Free World

Starred review from December 7, 2020
Subversive culture flourished under geopolitical tension and nuclear anxiety, according to this sweeping cultural history. New Yorker contributor Menand (The Metaphysical Club) surveys a panorama of avant-garde movements that emerged between 1945 and 1965, including French existentialism; beat poetry; the second-wave feminism of Betty Friedan; and the antiracist writings of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Frantz Fanon. Scandalous art world scenes, from the abstract expressionists to Warhol’s Factory, and musical outrages like composer John Cage’s 4’33” are also explored. Menand excavates the socioeconomic roots of these developments, including how rising high school enrollment fueled the spread of rock ‘n’ roll, but above all he’s concerned with the tangled human relationships that nurtured them; he traces, for example, how the improbably intersecting passions and neuroses of Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady incubated “Howl” and On the Road. Menand writes with his usual mix of colorful portraiture, shrewd insight, and pithy interpretation, describing the “feeling of personal liberation achieved through political solidarity” of 1960s student activists as “a largely illusory but nevertheless genuinely moving sense... that the world was turning under their marching feet.” The result is an exhilarating exploration of one of history’s most culturally fertile eras. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency

Starred review from February 1, 2021
An overstuffed, brilliantly conceived and executed history of "a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world." New Yorker staff writer and Harvard English professor Menand offers a companion of sorts to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club (2001), looking back on the time stretching from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author examines an age when "people believed in liberty," informed by thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell and their views of the meaning of liberty in a time of encroaching totalitarianism. Menand's lengthy narrative is bracketed by an intellectual hero, George Kennan, who studied Russia for decades and had a gimlet-eyed view of the problem that informed the U.S. side of the Cold War: how to contain the postwar ambitions of the Soviet Union. Kennan "thought that subversion and talk of world revolution were things to be taken seriously, but he was not alarmed by them," and he argued that the Soviet Union was weak, doomed to collapse one day, and unlikely to mount a military campaign against the West. He was right on all counts. Meanwhile, other thinkers weighed in: Koestler, Burnham, MacDonald, Mills, Arendt, and, in Europe, Sartre and Camus. Menand deftly blends social and intellectual history, observing that while words such as teenager and counterculture were current in the 1940s and '50s, it wasn't until the late '50s and early '60s that the baby boomer generation rose to become a political and especially economic force. (Even so, he points out, " 'Young people' in the 1960s were not that young," citing as an example Abbie Hoffman, born in 1936.) Whether writing of Woodstock, Frantz Fanon, Andy Warhol, the CIA, Vietnam, or Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Menand is a lucid and engaging interpreter of the times. An essential survey of an era for which many readers, considering what has followed, will be nostalgic.

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March 1, 2021

This sweeping intellectual history examines the flowering of European and American art and thought during the two decades after World War II. Culture became a Cold War battleground, ostensibly pitting liberal democracy against totalitarianism. Menand (English, Harvard Univ.; The Marketplace of Ideas) tackles art and music, literature, philosophy, and theory, showcasing the cross-pollination between thinkers and artists on both sides of the Atlantic. He generally sticks to the canon and to luminaries such as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist George Orwell, critic Lionel Trilling, painter Jackson Pollock, and poet Allen Ginsberg. Menand covers French and German cultural figures, sometimes in depth, but chiefly to the extent that they influenced or were influenced by Americans. Peripheral to Menand's grand narrative are Latin Americans, Asians, and southern Europeans. A few women and Black intellectuals are featured, and the misogyny rampant in literary circles is addressed. Menand is an academic who writes accessibly despite his book's extensive citations and overall length. VERDICT Readers of The New Yorker or The Atlantic will appreciate this detailed look into the Cold War. This sweeping synthesis evinces a polymath's range and grasp but treads familiar ground with its focus on the Western canon.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

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August 20, 2021
Pulitzer Prize-winning Menand seemingly compresses a lifetime of knowledge into this astonishingly comprehensive yet utterly compelling epic of American postwar cultural and intellectual history. World War II resulted in countless artists and intellectuals emigrating to the U.S. who would blend their European sensibilities with the explosion of art and ideas emanating from our own civil rights and feminist movements and the thousands of soldiers with G.I. Bill-funded educations. This convergence reshaped and influenced nearly every aspect of life from politics, economics, and philosophy to art, music, and literature. Menand brilliantly charts the trajectory as each generation and movement responds to and builds on its predecessors. Every page is crammed with underline-worthy anecdotes and fascinating detail as he traces the evolution of such wide-ranging subjects as communism, consumerism, anthropology, sociology, and media. We follow the through lines in visual arts from Duchamp to Pollock to Warhol, the music scene from Elvis and The Beatles to jazz and John Cage, the literary world from Faulkner, Orwell, and Hemingway to Baldwin, Ellison, and Mailer. From paperbacks to pop art, New Criticism to Deconstruction, French cinema to Bonnie & Clyde, and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys to Vietnam, this masterwork distills the innovative and turbulent genius of these richly creative decades to create a polished gem, destined to be a classic.

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