Login

 


 
     
Limit to available items
Record:   Prev Next
book jacket
BOOK
Title The free world : art and thought in the Cold War / Louis Menand
Author Menand, Louis
Imprint New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
©2021

LIBRARY / MAP CALL NUMBER STATUS MESSAGE
 Stadsbibl:Slottet vån 3 Samhällsvetenskap  306 engelska    CHECK SHELF  ---
Edition First edition
Descript xiv, 857 pages illustrations, portraits 24 cm
Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 729-813) and index
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. -- Provided by publisher
"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"-- Provided by publisher
Menand analyzes the economic, demographic, and technological forces that drove social and cultural change in US during the twenty years following the end of the Second World War. Introducing us to the personalities at the center of this transformation-- artists and thinkers both in the US and abroad-- he shows how they exerted a powerful influence on postwar art and thought. It was an exciting period of creative innovation and intellectual debate, and it gave birth to the United States we know today. -- adapted from jacket
Subject 1900-talet
Intellektuellt liv
Popular culture -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Political culture -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Cold War -- Social aspects
Kalla kriget -- sociala aspekter
Populärkultur -- historia
Politisk kultur -- historia
Förenta staterna
United States -- Civilization -- 1945-
United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
Instructional and educational works.
Classmark 306.09730904
Mqa
ISBN/ISSN 9780374158453 hardcover
Record:   Prev Next