"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice Named a most anticipated book of April by The New York Times | The Washington Post | Oprah Daily 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.
In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era.
On the break, I went up to Judy—and she's with somebody—I can talk to her through them. They have to do it a special way since she can't see signs. She has to actually feel the hands that spell things out. So I went over and said, ...
In BATTLEGROUNDS, H.R. McMaster describes efforts to reassess and fundamentally shift policies while he was National Security Advisor.
The Waste-Free World invites us all to take part in a sustainable and prosperous future where companies foster innovation, investors recognize long term value creation, and consumers can align their values with the products they buy.
Langer , William L. , and S. Everett Gleason . Challenge to Isolation , 1937-1940 ... McNeill , William H. The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II . Chicago : University of Chicago ... Austin : University of Texas Press , 1961 .
In Encylopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations , Volume 2 , edited by Bruce W. Jentleson and Thomas G. Paterson . New York : Oxford University Press , 1997 . Coombs , Herbert C. “ The Keynesian Crusade . ” Postwar Reconstruction Seminar ...
DDE to Emmet John Hughes, December 10, 1953, Papers, 15:749. 9. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp.
But though Garrison had repudiated the Constitution in the earliest days of The Liberator as " the most bloody and ... Northerners outside that camp.43 Henry David Thoreau had his own peculiarly individualistic brand of secession .
With his vast resources and nuclear arsenal, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty and the modern world order. For Garry Kasparov, none of this is news.
It tells the story of a generation, as played out in song lyrics and guitar riffs.