The Free World

Art and Thought in the Cold War

De: Louis Menand

Narrado por: David Colacci

"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

Reseñas de la Crítica

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

History at its richest

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

Brilliant but weak ion women's contribution

Louis Menand is a wonderful writer and introduces new insights when covering even well-known material. However, I was somewhat taken aback at the emphasis on male contributors. Even when introducing a remarkable figure such as Simone de Beauvoir he primarily discusses her relationship with Sartre but says very little about here contributions to philosophy and feminism. Later when he mentions the impact of feminism and at least discusses Betty Friedan, it feels like this section was an after thought. I am a man, and well aware of how much intellectual thought was driven, at least publicly, by men, and yet in this day and age you would expect a writer who is covering such a broad intellectual landscape to be more sensitive to the contributions of women.

Recording cut off

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