Adorno in America David Jenemann, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. The dialectical critic of must both participate in and not participate. Only then doe he do justice to his object and to himself. (Theodor Adorno, Prisms, 33) Theodor W. Adorno was one of the twentieth century's most erudite and insightful, yet most maligned, Marxist cultural critics. Author of the two key texts on twentieth century aesthetics and critical thought, Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics, Adorno is perhaps most well-known as the co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with his fellow Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer, a blistering indictment of the western industry. Adorno and Horkheimer perceived the not only as the incubator of fascism but as the culmination of a millennium long march toward barbarism ironically arising out of the very pursuit of Enlightenment itself. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written during World War II while the authors were in exile from their native Germany, having relocated to the United States with the rise of fascism in Germany. Scholarly interest in Adorno 's scholarship has accelerated over the last several decades, as David Jenemann points out in his fascinating new book on Adorno 's years of American exile, to the extent that there is a veritable cottage of new Adorno scholarship especially arising in the wake of his centenary. In addition there has been an intense focus on the culture industry thesis within this scholarship, most of which reiterates commonly held assumptions regarding Adorno 's intellectual elitism and perceived anti-Americanism. As Jenemann notes, Whether pro- or contra-Adorno, these efforts tend to confirm the horror Adorno felt when faced with the products of the mass media and of America in general (xv). Even outstanding scholars, such as Martin Jay and Frederic Jameson, so central to the restoration of the Adorno and the Frankfurt School to American intellectual discourse, criticize Adorno 's cultural elitism and anti-Americanism. With the exception of Alex Thomson's recently published Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006), Adorno's American sojourn most often is regarded as a low point rather than a high point of his career. From Jenemann's perspective, this scholarship overlooks the fact that Adorno lived in America for fifteen years and for nearly ten of those years he was an American citizen. By contrast, Jenemann's narrative looks at several segments of Adorno's life in America in a highly complex and mediated fashion that goes against the grain of most American scholars' understanding of Adorno's body of work. His intent is to explore the depths of Adorno's engagement with the production and consumption of mass or, in other words, to examine Adorno's life in America in as dialectically a complex manner as Adorno's own critical theorizing sought to do. Jenemann draws extensively upon archival materials including numerous memos, letters, and unpublished documents, such as FBI and State Department Files accessed through the Freedom of Information Act. Aside from the obvious of surveillance that ensnare Horkheimer and Adorno very early on (there is an interesting little aside in which Horkheimer stops his gray 1941 Buick Century in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to send an innocuous telegram to fellow Frankfurt School colleague Friedrich Pollock that triggers an entire FBI investigation), what stands out from Jenemann's excellent research is the extent to which Adorno was engaged with American mass culture, from his debut on radio in February 1941 to his presence at the movie premier of Watch on the Rhine starring Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. Adorno's Hollywood profile was significant enough that even entertainment gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote a telegram to J. Edgar Hoover identifying Adorno as part of the Institute of Social Research. …