![Amazon prime logo](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/marketing/prime/new_prime_logo_RGB_blue._CB426090081_.png)
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-49% $17.99$17.99
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: LC HAWAII LLC
Save with Used - Good
$9.99$9.99
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Dream Books Co.
Learn more
1.27 mi | ASHBURN 20147
![Kindle app logo image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/app/kindle-app-logo._CB668847749_.png)
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War Hardcover – April 20, 2021
![iphone with kindle app](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/dp/nfcx/PersistentWidget-Ruby-Large._CB485955431_.png)
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
"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
One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021
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.
- Print length880 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateApril 20, 2021
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.78 x 9.29 inches
- ISBN-100374158452
- ISBN-13978-0374158453
Frequently bought together
![The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81JRAmiVL8S._AC_UL116_SR116,116_.jpg)
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in AmericaPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Friday, Jul 26
- Pragmatism: A ReaderPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Saturday, Jul 27Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
- Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Vintage Departures)PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Friday, Jul 26
- Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our TimesHardcoverFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Friday, Jul 26
- A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped ThemPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Friday, Jul 26
- BloodlandsPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Friday, Jul 26
From the Publisher
Praise for The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The evenhanded approach of Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Metaphysical Club, is like a breath of fresh air. The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written, it covers the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review
"[The Free World] is an engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project―as idiosyncratic as it is systematic―written by an author confident that the things that interest him will interest his readers, too. And he’s right . . . Menand’s digressions hardly digress; they are essential to the story . . . I was sad to reach the end." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post
"Sweeping and searching, immensely informative, insightful, lucid and engaging, Menand’s magnum opus bolsters his reputation as a leading public intellectual in the United States." ―Glenn Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"[A] joyous plunge into the cross-currents of Western culture in the 1950s and 1960s . . . Menand’s wit, precision, and skepticism are deployed at every turn to puncture pretensions and cut through all the accreted clichés . . . But for all his mastery of fine detail, his eyes are always scanning the horizon for power―who has it and how it is being used. And yet his book is never merely cynical." ―Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books
"[An] epic book . . . [Menand] takes on eclectic subjects with dedication and imagination . . . When [his] tracings of lives and encounters are combined with the explication of some difficult ideas, the result can be unusually illuminating . . . This suggestive and densely researched book will be a fertile resource for later writers." ―Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal
"Menand gracefully and lucidly narrates the concentrically related stories of George Kennan and postwar containment, the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus . . . [The Free World] is a kind of nonfiction novel with a hundred characters . . . Synthesizing biographical profile, historical scholarship, literary journalism, and cultural critique in dispassionate, brilliant prose, Menand gently corrects the accepted understanding of [the mid-20th century] rather than advancing case-closing judgements." ―Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe
"[The Free World] is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades . . . Menand is truly one of the great explainers . . . The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research." ―Mark Greif, The Atlantic
"Menand’s erudition and his ability to write on such a broad range of topics is what makes The Free World extraordinary. He has that knack for finding the never-before-told detail that enhances any story. This book provides an invaluable, incomparable overview. One feels that no one else could have done it; there is no competing product." ―Pat Lipsky, The New Criterion
"The Free World [is] something extremely rare in contemporary American culture, a work of history that is first and foremost a work of art . . . Beautiful, original, and idiosyncratic . . . The Free World is both a joy to read and an utterly original study of politics, foreign policy, and culture from the 1940s to the 1970s." ―Michael Kimmage, American Purpose
“Menand is such a skilled narrator . . . that his indelible capsule portraits of the artists themselves drive the book . . . Even with artists and writers I know well, Menand always offers an unfamiliar detail, a telling anecdote that was new to me . . . [He] deploys intellectual history, economic indicators, and sociological studies with a light but effective hand . . . ‘Landmark,’ ‘sweeping,’ ‘encyclopedic’: all of the adjectives that one would expect to find on the back jacket of a book like this do, in fact, aptly describe it.” ―Greg Barnhisel, Public Books
"Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . The range and inclusiveness of The Free World are dazzling . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do.” ―Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement
"A splendid book . . . It’s not possible, I’d say, to read [The Free World] without learning a vast amount about twentieth-century intellectual history . . . It will be a long time, I imagine, before a better account of art and thought in mid-twentieth-century America appears." ―George Scialabba, The Baffler
"The Free World is a finely balanced book: not a history of culture as a reflection of cold war ideology, but a history of the culture that happened all around it. A starry cast of characters―from George Orwell and John Lennon to Betty Friedan and Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt and Jack Kerouac―bring personality to one of the most fascinating periods in western culture whose ideas of freedom are still felt profoundly today." ―Alex von Tunzelmann, Financial Times
"The Free World dazzles. Menand excels at the quick character sketch, the ability to situate a person in her milieu and explain her significance in a few lines or paragraphs. Virtually nothing is superficial . . . Virtually nothing is boring." ―John T. McGreevy, Commonweal
"Menand is not only an engaging critic. He is a superb thumbnail biographer. His book is bound to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand mid-20th-century America . . . By the end of The Free World, the pleasure that Menand has taken from assembling such a wide range of material is unmistakable.” ―Nicolaus Mills, The Daily Beast
"[Menand] has taken one of freedom’s ancillary slogans―“the free world”―beyond its usual associations with foreign policy and presidential muscle . . . and endowed it with multiple meanings in this deeply researched and ultimately personal reckoning with midcentury America. In this wide-ranging story, he displays a gifted eye for the telling anecdote, an enviable ability to explain the complicated with clarity and economy and an impressive mastery of detail." ―Andy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
“Remarkable . . . The Free World explores one of the most consequential and transformational periods in American history, a time of affluence and influence, upheaval and fracture . . . [It] is an engrossing and often revelatory book, a capacious, ambitious, and wonderfully crafted synthesis of intellectual and cultural history . . . Menand boasts a sharp observational wit and a knack for a turn of phrase . . . [The Free World is] a work of historical and intellectual curation that in its best moments has the elegance and evocative power of art itself.” ―Jack Hamilton, Slate
"Readers of The Metaphysical Club or Menand’s critical essays in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, will recognize the elegant, even-keeled prose in The Free World. He aspires to take readers by the hand and walk them through complex abstractions." ―Marc Tracy, The New York Times
"One function of literary journalism should be just what Menand does in The Free World: Remind us of how much we’ve forgotten or neglected . . . Good historians, like Menand . . . , seek to understand and interpret . . . The Free World presents a long, panoramic tour of a paradigm-shifting era." ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"[The Free World] fits perfectly with recent trends in transnational history, and its execution in that realm [. . .] is fantastic, showing both the larger forces (free markets, distribution networks, higher education) and street-level circumstances that allowed art and ideas to bounce around the world . . . Menand’s writing provides its own proof of concept. There’s no one else who captures the push and pull of life and ideas quite as well as he does, embedded in a way of looking at the world that is generous and humane. ―Scott Spillman, The Point
“Magisterial . . . Menand offers lucid, exactingly crafted, deeply informed accounts of the artists, intellectuals, and tastemakers who, during the Cold War, sought freedom from prevailing intellectual, artistic, political, and commercial systems . . . For the task he takes on, he succeeds brilliantly. What most comes across is the protean creativity of the period, the globe-spanning connections that promoted it, and Menand’s mastery of large slices of it.” ―Michael Sherry, The American Scholar
"A sumptuous canvas of postwar culture and global politics, impeccable scholarship paired with page-turning prose. Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Jackson Pollock, Susan Sontag: all spring to life here, flawed individuals as well as intellectual titans, with Cold Warriors such as George Kennan pulling the planet’s puppet strings against a curtain of potential nuclear annihilation." ―Oprah Daily
"Menand’s style is reliably crisp and lively, and he has a great eye for the incongruous anecdote." ―The New Republic
"Brilliantly conceived and executed . . . Menand deftly blends social and intellectual history . . . Menand is a lucid and engaging interpreter of the times . . . Essential.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] sweeping cultural history . . . Menand writes with his usual mix of colorful portraiture, shrewd insight, and pithy interpretation . . . The result is an exhilarating exploration of one of history’s most culturally fertile eras.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Louis Menand’s The Free World is at once an astonishing work of history and criticism and an essential road map to the middle decades of the twentieth century, from Sartre, Trilling, and Mailer to Sontag, Rauschenberg, and Baldwin. Every page is bracing; the whole amounts to an epic. In a landmark study of a time when art and ideas mattered, Menand’s very act of interpretation, the book itself, shows why they still do.” ―Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
“This sweeping intellectual and cultural history resembles one of those vast Renaissance paintings that lets you see simultaneously both the curvature of the earth and the buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms. Louis Menand’s cast of characters and range of interests are enormous, from Allen Ginsberg to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger to Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog.’ But coursing through this vast panorama is a sustained reflection on the hidden relation between global politics and the life of the mind.” ―Stephen Greenblatt, author of Tyrant and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
“What do Richard Wright, Betty Friedan, and Elvis Presley have in common? They are all pieces in the giant puzzle masterfully assembled by Louis Menand in this magnum opus. The result is a dazzling panorama of the Cold War but also a captivating case study in Menand’s great subject: how art and ideas matter in the world. A thinking person’s page-turner.” ―Martin Puchner, author of The Written World and The Language of Thieves
“It’s hard to know which to admire more in Louis Menand’s book on the culture of the Cold War: the range of his interests and the depth of his understanding, the calm complexity of his judgments, the genuine passion for disinterested historical understanding, or the quiet, delicately deadpan wit that illuminates his prose. Whether he is writing on the Beatles or the CIA, the reader can never anticipate, beginning a chapter, where it will go, or what judgment will end it, or what sentence will crown it. Minds as coolly independent as Menand’s come along once in a generation, and this long-in-the-making book was worth the wait.” ―Adam Gopnik, author of A Thousand Small Sanities and Paris to the Moon
“A lavish synthesis of the world of art, ideas, and politics from the Depression to Watergate, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War chronicles the liveliest skirmishes at the heart of twentieth-century American intellectual life. I both learned from and argued with Louis Menand’s choices and sizzling interpretations on every page. Probably no encounter with an 850-page book could be any more satisfying. With a special feeling for New York and Paris, this colossal achievement of imagination will bring erudition, controversy, and pleasure to readers for many years to come.” ―Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960
“Louis Menand’s The Free World is a tour de force― clear-sighted, brilliantly written, and full of surprises. It will change the way you think about everything from containment to consumerism, the Beats to the Beatles.” ―Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction and Under a White Sky
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Standard Edition (April 20, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 880 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374158452
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374158453
- Item Weight : 2.56 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.78 x 9.29 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #368,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #475 in European Politics Books
- #1,100 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #1,394 in History & Theory of Politics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Louis Menand](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41dCgQRGFvL._SY600_.jpg)
Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of "The Metaphysical Club," which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book enjoyable, brilliantly written, and wryly observed. They also appreciate the impressive minutiae Menand digs up and the information about important people and events. Overall, customers say the book is worth reading to supplement their knowledge of the era.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book entertaining and enlightening. They also say it's worth reading to supplement their knowledge of the era, very detailed, and rich.
"...But the survey is informative and insightful, and, on its own terms, not superficial...." Read more
"...All of this makes for a wonderful read, and I will surely go back and look at the author’s other books, which I suspect have a similar approach...." Read more
"...This book makes connections between art, science, philosophy and literature that dazzled me! I read it in one sitting…..no, I inhaled it!" Read more
"...The Free World is entertaining to read, well written, full of facts, facts of a secondary kind at least, though many of them might be familiar to..." Read more
Customers find the book brilliantly written, detailed, and rich. They also say it covers relationships they didn't know about.
"Brilliantly written, and wryly observed, survey of the vicissitudes, contingencies, and random chance historicities of what intellectuals deemed to..." Read more
"...If you have the time to invest, it's a tome, but a remarkably cogent read throughout...." Read more
"This is a real tour de force and a great read...." Read more
"Just what I would expect from a New Yorker writer. Beautiful lyrical writing, an astonishing amount of clear solid information packed into a single..." Read more
Customers find the book's content interesting, with much information about important people and events. They also appreciate the survey of the vicissitudes, contingencies, and random events in cultural, political, and social history.
"Brilliantly written, and wryly observed, survey of the vicissitudes, contingencies, and random chance historicities of what intellectuals deemed to..." Read more
"...The Free World is entertaining to read, well written, full of facts, facts of a secondary kind at least, though many of them might be familiar to..." Read more
"...The result is an unlikely array of cultural, political and social history...." Read more
"...of this book is spent deep in the weeds and Menand only rarely provides a holistic view...." Read more
Customers find the book far too long, with 727 pages.
"...The book is almost 900 pages yet, given its scope, seems too short...." Read more
"...The book is very long but one can read a chapter at a time and come back to it without any loss. Menand writes smooth prose." Read more
"...Menand’s presentation idiosyncratic, random, and, at 727 pages, far too long...." Read more
"Brilliant but very difficult & lengthy reading: A firehose of a book..." Read more
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The book’s premise is that America built tremendous cultural capital by its defense of the world from Nazism and thus was able to dominate Western culture in an era when many European countries were simply trying to recover. Thus, Menand aptly closes with the Vietnam war; a war in which whatever moral superiority the United States enjoyed on the world stage was quickly dissipated.
The book’s major strength is its ability to discuss difficult cultural artifacts, such as Jackson’s drip paintings, to a reader who doesn’t have the intellectual apparatus to understand them on their own. Menand also ties together cultural figures and currents into a united story; one could easily imagine this used as a text in an undergraduate seminar.
Its major fault is that it fails to give any recognition to conservative culture. When conservative figures are mentioned it is almost always derisively; even respected scholars like Mortimer Adler are dispensed with in a few sentences.
But it will probably serve as a paradigm for the history of post WWII left leaning American culture for a long time to come. Whatever flaws it has from its nostalgic aspects are somewhat balanced by the historian’s critical eye that separates yarns and legends from actual history. Despite flaws, it is worth reading by all who want to understand American cultural history. Highly recommended.
That is no doubt to Menand's benefit since most of his attempts to offer interpretations of anything are at best shallow and largely deflationary. This is a book of cultural history by a writer whose primary aim, subtly presented at times, at others overt, is to deflate any pretensions to meaning or transcendent importance that might be claimed by any part of the various cultures about which he writes, including the people within it who create it. Menand often seems to relish the biographical details or historical events he crowds his book with for their capacity to undermine what he regards as false impressions of the arts' importance.
Does he look closely at any of Faulkner's novels or stories? No. Instead, he quotes often cited words from interviews that show him at his worst. Does he spend any time thinking about one of Truffaut's films? No. He writes about the director's early flirtations, if that is what to call it, with fascism. Does he look, truly look, at any painting by Rothko or Gottlieb or even de Kooning, whose work is at least referred to with a bit more attention, though shallowly. No. He spends most of his section on the Abstract Expressionists writing about two critics of opposing views, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (representing the work of the latter inexactly), not on the artist's own statements which for Menand would only be a form of posing in any case. He isn't interested so much in the work, as in its critics whose ideas about them predominant over the paintings in his discussions.
I am sure he could not abide Rothko's claim for his work, that it is an attempt to revivify the tragic and sublime in his time. The only meanings Menand approves are those meanings which acknowledge their own emptiness. One makes art solely to make art not for its own sake, that would be too aestheticizing for Menand, but to be an artist and enjoy its perks, though it is neat if at the same time it gives others something to look at (Rauschenberg, say) or to pay a kind of mindless attention to (Cage). It is not that his writing on those two, like so many others, is only favorable. He always deflates something about everyone he writes about. But he seems to appreciate their ironies more that he admires more probing artists. At least they lack the smugness of the cultural snobs he finds either controlling taste or lurking everywhere behind the scenes. And, after all, what really is there to probe? There is a nihilistic undercurrent to much of The Free World.
It would seem that Menand believes all of art, all of politics, for that matter, is a kind of stunt, a means of getting oneself noticed, of being a player in a world of aesthetic or political consumption. For that one needs a style. (Or, if one is involved in politics, a mode of thought which is tantamount to a style).
It is their for style, for instance, that he praises the Beats. On p. 476, he cites work by four poets, W.S. Merwin, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright. Hecht and Wilbur were mid-century formalists, Wright and Merwin poets in part influenced by Spanish surrealism, poets of the deep image. Menand says of the excepts that theirs is the kind of verse "that Eliot was ridiculing forty years earlier." (It is not, but that is another matter.) Stock pastoral props, an archly literary diction, too much about dead dogs, he complains.
Then on page 479 he quotes from a long letter by Neal Cassady that begins, "Let me tell you, boy, there is nothing like a fine old mountain ballad, but when Mary Lou got drunk (nightly)..." and so on. This passage, it will turn out, encapsulates what Menard admires about the Beats. They are poets of the body, with no high minded nonsense to them and lots of slang and demotic speech. The four poets he quotes earlier are poets of the mind. The Beats have music in their voices; the poets earlier quoted as examples of bad poetry have none.
Again, as so often happens in this lengthy, but not exhaustive book, whenever Menand tries to interpret work of art he either evades looking deeply at it or listening to it attentively or reading it closely (he has a great distaste for the New Critics, mind men all and too many right wingers among them, he claims, again wrongly) or misreads it badly. The last thing Hecht or Merwin could be called is unmusical with no concern for or expressions of the sensual world and the body. How much of either has he carefully read?
The heart and soul of their poetry are music and rhythm and sensuality, often far more subtle than anything the Beats, whose poetry tends toward the rhetorical, generally achieved. And if Menand had bothered to read more attentively, not so glibly, the poems from which his excerpts were derived he would have found they are not about pastoral props or arch literary diction or dead dogs. About these four writers he is either ignorant or deliberately obtuse. (So is also the case with many others artists of various sorts throughout the book.) And where are all the many great poets of the era who fit no category whatsoever and therefore would not suit his narrow schematics, far too rigid in its insistence on contrasts, this against that with no resolutions. Where is George Oppen, or Elizabeth Bishop, or James Schuyler, John Logan, Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz, all of them also influential, significant poets? I could easily list dozens more.
I do not mean here to set the formalist poets or the deep image poets of the fifties against the Beats. I am offering this one example merely to show how, over and over again, Menand deflates whatever he finds to be pretentious, smug, academic, intellectual, poets as he sees Merwin and the others to be. He is one of those intellectuals who is constantly sniffing out other intellectuals to expose them for what they really are, frauds in a sense, making claims for an importance no art should make. Does Menand see the whole world of culture, even politics, as the world of men and women on the make? His books would seem to imply so, at times. Why do so many of the footnotes he offers add some derogatory remark about those or what he does discuss? Some put down?
Perhaps that is why, when he writes about movies, he seems to find more fellow feeling with Pauline Kael than anyone else. After all, it is only entertainment the public is seeking, she says and he seems to agree. And films should be entertaining; that's it. Like her exposing the pretentiousness, a dishonest pretentiousness at that as Kael sees it, of Dwight Macdonald's review of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Menand seems bent on exposing everyone's pretentiousness. Look at how he reads the history of The New Yorker and its intentions, a middle class, middlebrow sham for high art, for which he has little to no use, a form of snobbery to him.
As I've already mentioned, much in this book suffers from what it leaves out.. Staying with the chapter on movies for just another moment, I would cite the lack of any mention , for instance, of Bergman or Antonioni or Bunuel, no doubt all too pretentious and self-important and arch and all that for Menand to mention, whatever their politics.
His section on music focuses largely on Cage, touches on Boulez and Stockhausen, but there is no word about William Schuman's, Bernstein's, or Copland's music, say, or the other, non avant-garde composers of Britain or France or Russia or Nordic countries whose work would not yield to Menand's dismissals of culture of any kind that attempt at or struggle for transcendent significance.
And, of course, along with that lack, the book makes almost no mention whatsoever of religion. One does not have to be a believer oneself to understand that religion of some sort almost inevitably is part of any culture and that, in one or another, any discussion of it needs to acknowledge it. But the problem with it is, like political dogmatism, it claims for itself, whether rightly or wrongly, meanings which are not subject to irony.
What I mean is that a book, even a very long one, makes its own purposes clear not only by what it includes, but by what it leaves out. And many of those concerns he leaves out are arts or members of a culture of some sort for whom meaning remains important, however difficult or even impossible it is to achieve, and for whom sincerity and seriousness, however much subject to sentimentality and misunderstanding they might be, remain important, indeed critical.
I cite one more instance of poets the book neglects. Menand does mention the poets of the "San Francisco Renaissance" a few times, but he does not seem to know that that name does not designate the Beats but Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and others in their circle whose poetry and poetics were radially different from the Beats. Why?
It is hard to know what Menand might have made of them, of course. What he writes about Olson at Black Mountain, is glancing and superficial, but it suggests misunderstandings. Does he not know of Olson's reading at Berkeley in 1965 and its instigations toward Projective Verse? Yes, breath was critical to Olson, the line and breath. But meaning for him was part of that breath: that which exists through itself is what is called meaning, he said.
Of course, Menand could have included much more, almost endlessly. That would have made an impossible book. But the choices he does make remain telling, and the San Francisco Renaissance poets are among those of the period for whom what might be loosely called the religious or sacred call of the arts remained potent. I think Menand would find that call ridiculous or absurd. But there it is, nonetheless, part of the "meanings" of the era he discusses.
It is meaning that this book is against, the idea that art and its culture should or could be meaningful. It intends to deflate it where it detects such ambitions. The Free World is entertaining to read, well written, full of facts, facts of a secondary kind at least, though many of them might be familiar to those who know the era. I recommend reading the book nevertheless with caution, if only for the anecdotes which are what drive it and keep it lively and entertaining, if entertainment is what one is after.
But reading it is also a bit like listening to gossip that means to diminish or dismiss the object of its words: a person or cause or politician, say. After a while, one wants to shout, Can't you find anything better or more important or more generous to say about anyone? Yes, one might be entertained, but afterward, one feels slightly lessened, too, because of all the book's deflations and derogations. At the end of this book, what, really, is one left with?
Top reviews from other countries
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
For readers with other books on the go, don’t be intimidated by the length of this one. I was determined to read it quickly and did so, but taking it a section at a time should be equally satisfying.
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)