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

Excerpt

The Free World, Louis Menand’s diffuse, voluminous history of “art and thought in the Cold War,” attempts to enfold between its covers the whole cosmos of enterprise and achievement that defined American postwar culture, from Elvis Presley and the Beatles to Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, from Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Existentialists to Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists, from Yoko Ono and “Happenings” to John Cage’s experimental music, from Lionel Trilling to Hannah Arendt, and more besides. Whether or not it succeeds is an open question. The book has already called forth some striking critical responses. Reviewing the book for The Tablet (27 April 2021), the scholar and journalist David Mikics complained that it ‘shows what can happen when an intellectual confuses fancy cocktail party chatter with ideas and books’. Menand’s book, Mikics writes, ‘obsessively racks up facts that may seem suggestive but lead nowhere,” and suggests that the composition of The Free World “wasted years of Louis Menand’s time’. The review is titled ‘Louis Menand’s Cultural Death March’. …