The Free World

"This brick of a book is a dazzling, often dizzying, cultural history of the decades following World War II. It was a period when, in Louis Menand’s words, “Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered.” I learned a lot about towering intellectual and artistic figures such as George Kennan, James Baldwin and Pauline Kael. Much to his credit, Menand does not indulge in hero worship. His sketches can be frank and unflattering. And he does not skimp on the struggles of women, as well as writers and thinkers of color, to get their due in the intellectual hothouse of Cold War America."