Louis Menand. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

Abstract

Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War arrives with all the signifiers of a landmark. The product of nearly two decades of work by a prominent New Yorker critic and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, its dust jacket includes promises from assembled luminaries that it will be “dazzling,” “astonishing,” “coolly independent,” a “colossal achievement of imagination.” Encompassing 727 pages of text, not inclusive of notes, its chapters wind with smooth confidence across varied terrain: from literary studies (Trilling; Ransom; Derrida; de Man), to popular (the Beatles) and avant-garde (John Cage) music, to social and political theory (Sartre; Riesman; Arendt; Lévi-Strauss; Berlin; Fanon), to cultural criticism (Orwell; Baldwin; Sontag; Baraka; Kael), to the visual arts (Abstract Expressionism; commercial design; Pop Art; Godard). Readers will find a wealth of illuminating narrative details, braided together in an extraordinarily ambitious and finely wrought synthesis of the intellectual life of the age. The book has already achieved a broad audience and will be an essential office companion for lecturers on American cultural and intellectual history for decades to come.