![]() Fully original, beautifully written, it covers the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II. The evenhanded approach of Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Metaphysical Club,” is like a breath of fresh air. There too often is a blind spot in which the positives of this era - soaring college enrollments, record book sales, judicial blows against racial injustice, a declining wealth gap - are viewed as tangential to the narrative, or worse, as cover for the nation’s many ills. It is much the same regarding studies of Cold War culture, with book upon book skewering lowbrow entertainment, excessive consumerism and stifling conformity. Their narratives, for the most part, stress racism, McCarthyism, the diminishment of women, restrictive immigration laws - all vital truths, but not the only truths, from our admittedly messy past. Historians who write about the early Cold War era have a particularly sharp eye for the underside of American politics. THE FREE WORLD Art and Thought in the Cold War By Louis Menand
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