Lewis Menand, The Free World *** 1/2

The subtitle of The Free World is "Art and Thought in the Cold War." The preface suggests a book similar to Postwar but for cultural changes rather than political ones, and therefore centered in the United States rather than Europe. 

This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world... the twenty years after the end of the Second World War. ... This is not a book about the "cultural Cold War" (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy), and it is not a book about "Cold War culture" (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions). It is about an exceptionally rapid and exciting period of cultural change...

This description is misleading. First of all, most of the postwar cultural changes got started in the period between the wars, so it feels like the book covers most of the 20th century. Secondly, very few of the changes came about because of the geopolitical situation: American "active engagement" with the rest of the world was not due to the Cold War but more due to the European refugees who came here during the Second World War.

The Free World is filled with unique perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar stories, but comes across as a hodgepodge. It takes effort from the reader to discern the through-line for the subjects covered in each chapter. As Adam Gopnik said in his review, "the reader can never anticipate, beginning a chapter, where it will go."

For example, Chapter 7, "The Human Science," starts with the short section about how "the Cold War and decolonization were coterminous. They are the duck-or-rabbit of postwar world history." The next section covers Claude Lévi-Strauss and the development of structuralism, followed by an account of the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster photography exhibition The Family of Man (1955), which seques into an introduction of the post-structuralist critic Roland Barthes.

The most prominent theme in Menand's account is the increased insularity of art and ideas. Structuralism interprets human behavior based on contrasts within a conceptual system; existentialism rejects the idea of objective essences; abstract art highlights the possibilities of the medium rather than attempting to connect to the external world; New Criticism and Deconstruction see works of literature as self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects. At least this is a theme I found -- Menand doesn't explicitly make the connection.

The Free World is a type of book that frustrates me. It contains many insights that I'm likely to absorb into my worldview (e.g. "The purpose of a magazine's editorial content is the same as the purpose of a television show's entertainment content: it is to pick out a demographic for advertisers"), but I'll never be able to find them due to Menand's discursive style.