The free world : art and thought in the Cold War

Author

Louis Menand

Call Number

• 306.0973 M534 (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2021]

Physical Description

xiv, 857 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm

Summary

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.

Contents

• Introduction: What the Cold War meant
• An empty sky
• The object of power
• Freedom and nothingness
• Outside the law
• The ice breakers
• The best minds
• The human science
• The emancipation of dissonance
• Northern songs
• Concepts of liberty
• Children of a storm
• Consumer sovereignty
• The free play of the mind
• Commonism
• Vers la libération
• Freedom is the fire
• Hollywood- Paris- Hollywood --- This is the end.