The Free World, Louis Menand
The Free World, Louis Menand
2 Rating(s)
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The Free World
Art and Thought in the Cold War

Author: Louis Menand

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 34 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/20/2021


Synopsis

"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

About Louis Menand

Louis Menand is professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include The Free World and The Metaphysical Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bagus

I could forgive the length of this book which is almost 944 pages for the rich contents inside it. Written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand, this book offers an interesting point of view to the Cold War period beyond the spectrum of the political sphere. It focuses on two subjects which inf......more

Goodreads review by J Earl

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War from Louis Menand is a sweeping survey that looks at how and why perceptions about the United States, both domestically and internationally, changed so completely during these years. First, as he makes clear in his Preface, this is neither a history of......more

Goodreads review by Craig

I began this with very high hopes; Menand's The Metaphysical Club deserves its reputation and, as his work for the New Yorker shows, he can write well. But the more I read, the more my disappointment grew. It's much closer to two stars than four. The reasons are multiple. First, for a book that purp......more

Goodreads review by Craig

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4. This great cube of print reads like a collection of essays loosely organized around a set of associated themes rather than the sustained development of any sort of claim about them. As for what these are, the title broadly points the way: “freedom,” “art,” “thought,” and......more


Awards

  • National Book Awards - Longlist
  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
  • Washington Post Best Books of the Year
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
  • Minneapolis Star Tribune Holiday Book Recommendations