MixedLos Angeles Times... [a] deeply researched and ultimately personal reckoning with midcentury America. In this wide-ranging story, he displays a gifted eye for the telling anecdote, an enviable ability to explain the complicated with clarity and economy and an impressive mastery of detail. He also exemplifies the limitations of his generation in thinking about both freedom and the book’s real subject, which is art ... It is a pity Menand can’t think more imaginatively about freedom. One can envision an alternative narrative of midcentury American ideas of freedom, sprung from domestic concerns and defined positively ... Having defined freedom mainly in its absence, Menand feels free to hopscotch through his favorite parts of midcentury mass high culture — painting, literature, the avant gardes — without concern for coherence or connection. The individual chapters tell compelling stories of artistic innovation and cultural liberalization but the tissue connecting one part to the other remains opaque, and a broader understanding of why freedom seemed so expansive at the time is elusive ... More to his credit, Menand also resists making overt connections between past and present, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. But his bric-a-brac approach does give the book a Forrest Gump vibe...When it works, it really works. When it doesn’t, the chapters sprawl and lose focus ... The result feels jumbled and overstuffed. Even if the individual stories are memorable and distinct, the sum of the parts threatens to capsize the whole ... There’s more than a whiff of elitism to Menand’s choices ... Perhaps the curio cabinet-effect reflects a desire to collect and recollect an essential American object Menand feels is in danger of being lost. Underlying his project is an earnest romantic belief that the world of the boomers, though shadowed by the anxieties and hypocrisies of the Cold War, was somehow freer than the present, its ideas brighter, its promises more promising.
Abraham Riesman
MixedLos Angeles Times[A] well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book. It’s also brutal ... There’s a corrective to be offered to the Lee Myth, but Riesman overplays his hand, diminishing his biography’s strengths by shading every story to Lee’s disadvantage ... The most illuminating sections focus on Lee’s personal life. Its raw material is straight out of Dickens by way of Kitty Kelley ... On the central question of Lee’s role in the creation of the Marvel Universe, Riesman doesn’t shed any new light. He views the paper trail as too thin and the participants’ memories as too inconsistent to draw definitive conclusions ... Riesman comes at the creation debate sideways — seeding doubt by emphasizing Lee’s unreliability as a narrator, his lack of other creative success and his wavering commitment to comics ... In focusing on the feuds with Jack Kirby and Ditko, True Believer downplays others who liked working with Lee ... The book shines when detailing Lee’s professional life after his 1980 move to Los Angeles, where he struggled to be taken seriously in Hollywood ... In recounting the scandalous last few years of Lee’s life, Riesman flashes the virtues and flaws of a skilled magazine writer capturing moments in their vivid immediacy. But he sometimes lacks the historical perspective of a biographer. Many of these later-life details feel disproportionate to the totality of Lee’s life and his place in the messy pantheon of Cold War American popular culture.
Jon Meacham
MixedLos Angeles TimesReaders who know little about Lewis will find an often moving story, but it will prove unsatisfying to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the movement ... Meacham’s impulses are laudable but more suited to an op-ed, in which stirring rhetoric trumps nuance. Stretched to book length, the history gets shaky, reliant on a dated understanding of the movement as primarily regional and religious, rather than national and political, and emphasizing what today are its most noncontroversial aspects ... Here’s the problem with reducing Lewis’ life to his time in the movement: It turns the movement into the John Lewis story. Meacham’s ideas about Christian witness fit the protests against segregated spaces but hold less value in understanding mobilizations against discrimination in jobs, housing and schools ... Meacham’s decision to eschew a full biography seems to have been also motivated by the 2020 election, aimed at drawing a parallel between Trump’s resurgent white nationalism and white segregationists. And yet, in doing so, he misses so much.
