The Free World

Art and Thought in the Cold War

By: Louis Menand

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 34 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

"Narrator David Colacci approaches this opinionated, engrossing audiobook with a practiced voice that lets its numerous stories tell themselves without fanfare...this audiobook is a monumental work." (AudioFile Magazine)

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 listeners 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 Rights 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2021 Louis Menand (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

2021 National Book Awards - Longlist

2021 Time Magazine Best Books of the Year

2021 Washington Post Best Books of the Year

2021 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year

2021 Minneapolis Star Tribune Holiday Book

Louis Menand is phenomenal.

Even a phenomenal work may leave a few unresolved reflections. The final chapters did not provide a sense of an ending despite its promise. This was likely intentional. But it was exacerbated by the Audible version that I received that ended two-and-one-half pages before the end of the book in mid-sentence. And, yes, I tried more than five times to get it to provide those last pages, but it would not and it was not operator error. Also, the reader, who has admirable diction and an ease with French phrases has a slightly snide tone. But Louis Menand is above all, a phenomenal witness to these two decades of art and thought.

Excellent survey of thought

Only catch: some irksome mispronunciations. Worthwhile listening all the same. I learned a lot I did not know about the early lives of influential thinkers, writers, and activists. Could have gone into more detail at certain points and less in others, but I’m sure that’s subjective.

History at its richest

Extraordinary text by Menand, perfectly read. I’ll be re-listening soon. It’s an exceptional book.

Recording cut off

The end cut off, which was disappointing. Audible needs to re-release it so we can hear how it ends.

Invaluable book can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t benefit from reading it

Completely necessary for anyone hoping to understand what Eric Hobsbawm calls The Short American Century and the part The Wise men played

The narration is wooden and riff with true gaff but mispronunciations however

Still. So invaluable I’m gong to read and listen again

An Incredible Journey

Who am I to rate a book by a scholar like Dr. Menand. The breath of his knowledge and intellectual ambition is matched by few in our world. That said, I enjoyed the incredible journey he takes the reader through in this long comprehensive book about the cultural history of the Cold War. Sometimes I did not know where he was going, so broad was his net, from pop culture to spy-wars to art and politics and everything in between. But even stories I was already familiar with had new and insightful information and an original point of view that kept it all fascinating and instructive. I felt I had just finished a semester long high level university course when I finished the book, which is not surprising since Dr Menand is an English professor at Harvard.

Ps: excellent narrator

Excellent book!

Great book and history of the 1945 - 1965 era. Can't say enough about it. If you've never understood modern art this book will help too. Totally unexpected ending about the CIA (you gotta read it). Many prominent arts and social movements of the era are covered -- Menand distills it all through mini-biographies. One of the best things about the book is that for every arts and social movements' controversies Menand presents the other side of, and push back to, those controversies.

Stunning

There are not words for how wonderful this listen is.

So much to learn- abstraction in art is the attempt to express the unconscious.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views,
beyond the comprehension of the weak.
John Adams

That dreary tribe of high minded women and sandal wearers and fruit juice drinkers
who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’, like bluebottles to a dead cat.
George Orwell

Todestrieb

Love the world weary narrator, who conveys the clear text.

One quibble- for a book with so much French the pronunciation is painful.
Does Audible not have pronunciation help for its readers?

Once Again

How many listeners have to complain that the book cuts off in midsentence toward the end before Audible does something about it ??? There are already multiple reviews mentioning this problem.

Musicians will chuckle

Narrator does a fine job, but hilariously calls John Cage’s 4’ 33” “Four feet, thirty-three inches” throughout.