The evenhanded approach of Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Metaphysical Club, is like a breath of fresh air. The Free World sparkles. 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. Menand is no cheerleader; his assessment of America’s failures can be withering. But his larger point, backed by a mountain of research and reams of thoughtful commentary, is that American culture ascended in this era for the right reasons ... Authors are free to choose their characters, of course, and Menand, with 727 pages of text, is freer than most. There are finely tuned capsule biographies of Elvis, the Beatles, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan and Tom Hayden, along with a host of public intellectuals whose occupation no longer exists. Hundreds of names are mentioned, making it difficult at times to connect the dots. And there are some curious omissions ... One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high.

... remarkable ... an engrossing and often revelatory book, a capacious, ambitious, and wonderfully crafted synthesis of intellectual and cultural history ... is in some ways an old-fashioned book. It’s a sprawling biography of an era, a work that often feels more like an enormous mural than a linear narrative, a connective and allusive act of creative assemblage. Menand is a historian and a critic, and The Free World openly approaches the writing of cultural history as an act of critical interpretation itself, which it is ... is also at times a history of criticism. Some of the critics taken up here might seem dated on first glance, but by placing them in the context that shaped them, Menand manages to breathe new life into them ... As a critic himself, Menand boasts a sharp observational wit and a knack for a turn of phrase ... One of the pitfalls of writing a combined cultural and intellectual history is that there can be a tendency to privilege culture made by people who most readily self-present as intellectuals, and in the period Menand is chronicling, those people were overwhelmingly white men. To his credit, Menand is upfront about this and often works diligently to counteract it ... Still, The Free World at times feels a bit blindered when it strides past paths not taken ... Parts of the book also feel like tours through territory that’s already well-trod ... But to nitpick the omissions of a book like The Free World is to miss its point, and its length (more than 700 pages, plus endnotes) shouldn’t be confused with an aspiration to comprehensiveness. It’s a work of historical and intellectual curation that in its best moments has the elegance and evocative power of art itself.

Menand serves up a vast, rambling, exhaustively researched, and highly personal helicopter survey ... Menand’s blizzards of dates and statistics bury the reader under deep drifts of Too Much Information. No one can accuse the author of not doing his homework, but maybe he spent too much time in his office in the stacks of the Widener Library (for which he expresses gratitude in his acknowledgments) and not enough making sense of the thousands of books and articles he has consumed ... He has committed the fatal sin of biographers and historians: falling in love with his sources ... The only way I could make my way through this massive tome was in very small doses, like reading separate entries in an encyclopedia ... There are some bright spots. His chapter on Hannah Arendt...conveys both the drama of her life (a last-minute escape from Nazi-occupied France through Lisbon to the United States) and the prophetic power of her ideas ... Unfortunately, Menand seems himself to have disregarded what he describes as one of the principles of the historicist hermeneutics she practiced: 'History is not facts, but the meaning of facts.'

... an engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project—as idiosyncratic as it is systematic—written by an author confident that the things that interest him will interest his readers, too. And he’s right ... There are so many different people to watch and works to consider — readers can skip from George Kennan to George Orwell, from the Beats to the Beatles, from Richard Wright to Betty Friedan — and so much is changing all at once that everything competes for attention. If it feels that way reading it, how must the era have felt living it? ... Menand’s digressions hardly digress; they are essential to the story ... For all the detail he offers and detours he cannot resist, Menand is also good at pithily summing up movements and people ... lengthy — 857 pages does require some commitment from both reader and writer — yet I was sad to reach the end. Even Menand’s footnotes are delightful. It is a book that compels you to buy other ones and to scour the Internet for old essays that seem entirely relevant once again ... I wanted Menand to be more explicit, to tell me what it all meant. I wanted more interpretation, not less.

For those of us who lived through any portion of this period and its immediate aftermath, the book is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades ... In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn ... Menand is truly one of the great explainers ... He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer ... The Free World is a treasury of details. Some complicate myths without displacing them ... Most of the memorable details are just funny ... The paradoxical feature of the book is that its stylish, comprehensive retellings of some of the most famous stories of the most famous individuals, weaving connections between them, made me doubtful and weary of them, and much more interested in minor figures whom we barely glimpse ... Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public ... Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed.

Sweeping and searching, immensely informative, insightful, lucid and engaging, Menand’s magnum opus bolsters his reputation as a leading public intellectual in the United States. The author illuminates exchanges between Americans, Western Europeans and anti-colonialists in the Caribbean, Africa, India and Asia ... Menand is extraordinarily adept at analyzing abstract concepts for readers ... He knows how to be judgmental as well as judicious.

... a perplexing achievement, encyclopedic in its reach, heroic in its research, lucid, readable, and frustrating ... Menand is, after all, a mighty polymath. He is a formidable explicator of complexities. And he is an amusing writer, wry, sly, and humane ... Menand, in writing about the Cold War decades, makes the mistake of supposing that what can be discussed in relatively cool and scientific tones counts as hard reality, and what can be discussed only in a more emotional language can be usefully ignored, or, as it were, amputated. This leads him to lop off the exuberance of the Abstract Expressionists and the rock ’n’ rollers in favor of, respectively, aesthetic discipline and commerce ... But chiefly Menand lops off the literature of social protest, in its principal version of those days ... precise and informative in its tiny foreground brush strokes, and blithely unconcerned with the larger fuzzy background ... My head is swimming after hundreds of pages of Menand’s alternately exciting and exasperating detail work[.]

This extraordinary book—a great pleasure to read—warrants every fine review it has received. It will win prizes ... Few will read this history and not see these artists, writers, and others in a new light. These more than 800 pages are wonderfully littered with portraits of such individuals as George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock ... Drawing on wide reading and much research, the author helps us view these figures and their work in often unexpected ways ... Throughout, he writes in highly accessible prose, as if discovering a person or topic for the first time (hardly the case). He is brilliant, and likeable, exhibiting passion for artists and ideas. There is excitement in his writing. And it helps bring the reader deep into subjects that never seemed all that interesting.

... at once brilliant and exasperating, illuminating and confounding, absorbing and off-putting— ... This would be a daunting project even if Mr. Menand had established some disciplinary boundaries, but as readers of his criticism in the New Yorker know, his interests and insights range widely ... he pulls together a decade of writing and research, but it doesn’t take long for us to see that this project is both overtly unsystematic and highly selective ... Eventually we accommodate ourselves to a nonstop, nearly phantasmagorical display of erudite inquiry ... Clearly, even with hundreds of pages at the author’s disposal, none of these chapter-length probes can do its theme full justice, particularly because Mr. Menand’s approach is not to make a systematic argument but to focus on particular individuals and advocates, noting their characters and interactions and ultimately implying that cultural and political change might be discernable in statistics but is largely accidental, full of misunderstandings and unintended consequences. Many things that happened, he implies, could not have been expected, or if they could have been, people might not have noticed. When these tracings of lives and encounters are combined with the explication of some difficult ideas, the result can be unusually illuminating. Some revelations may be trivial and others suggestive, but under Mr. Menand’s guidance, something always can be learned ... But why then, should this book also exasperate? First, because much of the interpretation is left to the reader. There is no attempt to shape the narrative into anything cumulative or conclusive. If there are varieties or notions of 'freedom' and 'liberty' in play here, they are only vaguely defined and never put in careful order, nor are we directed to any larger understanding of their interaction. It is strange: Much of the book is very concrete but it all ends up feeling rather amorphous ... this suggestive and densely researched book will be a fertile resource for later writers, even though Mr. Menand fails to address the challenges he raises at the very beginning.

... a very long book—727 pages, plus notes—though not a dense or difficult one. Menand’s style is reliably crisp and lively, and he has a great eye for the incongruous anecdote ... The book’s imposingness is also offset by the fact that it relies quite heavily on reworked or republished material...and it sometimes feels more like a gargantuan collection of articles on related topics than a true narrative history ... this self-satisfied nostalgia has permeated the culture industry for decades, and the highlights are now so burnished and familiar that a mere enumeration of events can feel like pandering. There were moments reading The Free World when I tried very hard not to break out into Billy Joel’s 'We Didn’t Start the Fire' ... Menand is a boomer (born 1952), but he’s not Billy Joel. He doesn’t pander to nostalgia. The temperature of his prose is low...In small doses, this blasé sensibility can be a tonic, an antidote to the hyperbole the material usually attracts. Sustained over 700 pages, though, it feels like an overcorrection: At times, Menand’s tone is so disenchanted that we wonder why we’re supposed to care about the events, ideas, and figures he chronicles at all ... The right, by the way, barely features in The Free World, despite its spanning the rise of the modern conservative and libertarian movements: a curious lacuna.

... a finely balanced book: not a history of culture as a reflection of cold war ideology, but a history of the culture that happened all around it. A starry cast of characters—from George Orwell and John Lennon to Betty Friedan and Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt and Jack Kerouac—bring personality to one of the most fascinating periods in western culture whose ideas of freedom are still felt profoundly today ... While the chapters form a more or less linear progression—rooting the cold war in the trauma of the second world war, and stretching forward to the civil rights struggle—The Free World can be dipped into rather than absorbed in one go. It is the nature of this book that it opens with a chapter tracing the origins of the diplomat George Kennan’s philosophy for containment of Soviet foreign policy ambitions, and a few chapters later is treating with refreshingly equal weight the global impact of Elvis Presley.

... [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.

It is a Herculean, revelatory examination of this vast historical terrain. Within its pages are a far-ranging dramatis personae ... wisely structured into discrete, yet cross-pollinating, loci. By dint of narrative sweep, analysis, a judicious use of statistics, and some not-inconsequential dollops of humor, the book presents a comprehensive picture. The Free World also—crucially—provides the space for readers to draw their own conclusions.

Menand gracefully and lucidly narrates the concentrically related stories of George Kennan and postwar containment ... It is a kind of nonfiction novel with a hundred characters ... Synthesizing biographical profile, historical scholarship, literary journalism, and cultural critique in dispassionate, brilliant prose, Menand gently corrects the accepted understanding of this period rather than advancing case-closing judgements.

Menand is an academic who writes accessibly despite his book’s extensive citations and overall length ... Readers of The New Yorker or The Atlantic will appreciate this detailed look into the Cold War. This sweeping synthesis evinces a polymath’s range and grasp but treads familiar ground with its focus on the Western canon.

Menand’s new book stretches beyond 700 pages and requires a plurality of people to thoroughly tell the story. But some also say he’s missing a big idea, or that if 'freedom' really is the connective tissue in this work, it doesn’t adequately conjoin each section ... Refreshingly, Menand doesn’t follow causality or the cascading effect of actors and events. Instead, he uses feedback loops, throughputs, and a sympathetic timeslot to anyone who had a new or bold idea. These may also be the defining features of the Cold War-era avant-garde, so it makes sense that he’d tell his story in this way, although it may at times feel a tad too complicated ... this structure hedges any hierarchy of particular ideas or artists. As constellations lose or gain their brightness by our position in relation to them, Menand’s articulation of the relations between people, ideas, and forms, is a system where the point is not to hierarchize major and minor characters. Linearity is downplayed, there is little reference to today’s 'topical' themes, and there are few 100-character aphorisms to offer simple guideposts ... Menand swaps hagiography for refreshing candor ... Entertainingly, subjects trade blows throughout Menand’s book ... Occasionally, you’d expect Menand to go further with illustrating the connections between characters ... Menand only occasionally trades an analysis of the shifting tides of identarian consciousness with the language of today’s discourse. The stories here don’t need this type of genuflection to popular heuristics because they are already ripe with meaning.

Menand writes with his usual mix of colorful portraiture, shrewd insight, and pithy interpretation ... The result is an exhilarating exploration of one of history’s most culturally fertile eras.

An overstuffed, brilliantly conceived and executed history ... Whether writing of Woodstock, Frantz Fanon, Andy Warhol, the CIA, Vietnam, or Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Menand is a lucid and engaging interpreter of the times ... An essential survey of an era for which many readers, considering what has followed, will be nostalgic.