11 New Books We Recommend This Week
May 20, 2021Updated 6:07 p.m. ET
“Ideas mattered,” Louis Menand writes in his new book, explaining the rise of American culture in the years after World War II. They still do, which is why big ideas underpin a lot of this week’s recommended titles, from astrophysics and the nature of scientific celebrity (in Charles Seife’s “Hawking Hawking”) to the pandemic and historical reactions to catastrophe (in Niall Ferguson’s “Doom”). There’s a look at the causes and consequences of misogynist violence (in Jacqueline Rose’s “On Violence and On Violence Against Women”) and a couple of takes on artistic success (in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel “The Plot,” and in Menand’s own book, “The Free World”).
Burning for freedom
By Walton Muyumba Globe Correspondent,Updated May 13, 2021, 1 hour ago
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âThe Free World,â Louis Menandâs intellectual history of the Cold War, offers an explanation of the periodâs rapidly-shifting, transatlantic, artistic and intellectual styles by âexamining the conditions of their production and reception.â Covering the years 1945-1972, Menand gracefully and lucidly narrates the concentrically related stories of George Kennan and postwar containment, the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Beats and The Beatles, Susan Sontag and second wave feminism, âatonalâ music and âdripâ painting, Andy Warhol and Pop Art, George Orwell and James Baldwin, the French New Wave and Pauline Kael. It is a kind of nonfiction novel with a hundred characters.
Louis Menand’s new book about art and thought in the postwar years features a very large cast, including George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag and the Beatles.