Free World

"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

"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