RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"The \'pursuit of vitality\' will strike few as an obvious framework for U.S. history. But it is the perfect quarry for Lears, who has spent his distinguished academic career excavating the spiritual and psychic substrate of American modernity ... For Lears, familiar milestones — wars, economic booms and busts, social movements — are just one way of plotting the American past. There is also what lurks beneath, a roiling struggle between the human quest for mastery and control and the siren song of the wild and spontaneous ... Lears does not hide his own preference for a world that admits animal spirits. Nor does he downplay its dangers. The worship of vitality powered eugenics, political manipulation and military adventures ... Animal Spirits strains to fit certain pieces of American history into its frame, such as Cold War culture and Reagan’s foreign policy. But there is brilliance in its improbable yet utterly persuasive leaps ... Even those unwilling to grant the presence of animal spirits in the dance hall crazes of the past or the corporate mindfulness programs of the present will be edified by this eloquent book. As Lears charts centuries of faith in the possibility of transcending visible, material, and calculable reality, what he ultimately exposes are the disappointments of our version of modernity — and, particularly, its inability to sustain a humane and creative culture genuinely open to the unknown. That conclusion haunts this master class in American cultural and intellectual history.\
Amy Gajda
PositiveThe AtlanticAmy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought ... Gajda traces the championing of privacy...back to the nation’s founding ... Gajda’s chronicle reveals an enduring tension between principles of free speech and respect for individuals’ private lives. But it also throws into sharp relief how much the context for that debate has changed in the past several decades ... There is another lesson to be drawn from Gajda’s history. From the earliest days of the republic, privacy law has best served the most privileged in American society: those with considerable clout and resources at their disposal.