American Studies

From Barnes & Noble

Beneath the ice cream cone on the cover lies a treat of a book. Louis Menand, the author of The Metaphysical Club, roams confidently around two centuries of American intellectual life. He explores the ramifications of pragmatism and light porno and describes the paradoxical fascination with free spirits and the quantification of intellect. Not even entertainment czars or sitting vice presidents are beyond his purview. An especially festive marketplace of ideas.

From the Publisher

"Fifteen essays: always intelligent, frequently interesting . . . Brilliant thinking . . . His intellectual range is limitless."—Kirkus Reviews

"This book collects some of the most cogent and clearly articulated of those pieces, and reaffirms Menand's position as a preeminent historian of American liberalism's cultural incarnations."—Publishers Weekly

A Collection That "Represents The Heart of Menand's Work . . . And Demonstrates His Status As His Generation's Premier Critical Talent"—Los Angeles Times

Publishers Weekly

The success of The Metaphysical Club, which won last year's Pulitzer Prize for History, surprised few regular readers of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where Menand has contributed many of the most thoughtful review-essays of the last decade. This book collects some of the most cogent and clearly articulated of those pieces, and reaffirms Menand's position as a preeminent historian of American liberalism's cultural incarnations. The opening pieces, on William James's depression (or "sadness") and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "bettabilitarianism," further the brilliant profile of pragmatism developed by Menand in The Metaphysical Club. The review-essay "T.S. Eliot and the Jews" is a sharp extension of the debate surrounding Anthony Julius's T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (and it might just entice someone to bring Menand's Eliot monograph, Discovering Modernism, back into print). Considerations of Richard Wright and Pauline Kael offer assessments of their achievements, showing why they still matter. The long New Yorker pieces on Al Gore and architect Maya Lin show Menand's rigorous disinterestedness working less well in the context of interview journalism, but essays that portray Hustler's Larry Flynt and evangelist Jerry Falwell as "working opposite sides of the same street," or exploring Christopher Lasch's flirtations with populism, throw that technique's power, and Menand's mastery of it, into bold relief. (Nov. 13) Forecast: Even though all these pieces have seen print before, expect extensive review coverage, some of which will occasion reflections on the success of The Metaphysical Club, which was released in paperback last April. The result should be spurred sales for Club, and solid numbers for this collection. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

From Pulitzer-winning scholar and New Yorker staff writer Menand (The Metaphysical Club, 2001), 15 essays: always intelligent, frequently interesting, sometimes tedious. A fascinating bit of sleuthing about William James's mental health ("William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient") could have been a part of The Metaphysical Club, as might "The Principles of Oliver Wendell Holmes," the latter familiar indeed to Menand's readers. A piece on Richard Wright allows one of Menand's most valuable kinds of aperçus ("For culture is not something that just comes with one's race or gender. Culture comes only through experience; there isn't any other way to acquire it"), and "The Long Shadow of James B. Conant" fascinates for the history it offers both of Harvard University and of the cold war. Dishing a little gossip on William S. Paley ("The Last Emperor"), Menand produces also a wonderful primer on the cynical history of network TV; he is candid and incisive on Norman Mailer ("Norman Mailer in His Time"), whose perhaps silly ideas about sex and power were stopped dead in their tracks by feminism ("If a vibrator is as good as a penis, life has no meaning"); a piece on Christopher Lasch is dense and ambitiously theoretical ("Christopher Lasch's Quarrel with Liberalism"), while "Lust in Action: Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt" reveals those two moralists to have come from the same pod. By volume's end, though, with, say, "The Mind of Al Gore," an exhaustion sets in, less from hard mental work than from a sameness of tone, an unflappable, always-perfect, almost professorial poise. Menand comments that Pauline Kael ("The Popist") wrote always at fever pitch, "as though souls [were] being savedand lost down at the cineplex every night." With passion, that is to say. If only Menand were to do the same. His intellectual range is limitless, his emotional range narrow. Brilliant thinking, though in a tone never given the reins.