American Studies
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ISBN10: 0374529000
ISBN13: 9780374529000
Trade Paperback
320 Pages
$23.00
CA$25.00
From the author of The Metaphysical Club—"a richly nuanced reading of American intellectual history" praised for its "rare common sense and graceful, witty prose" (Jean Strouse, The New York Times Book Review)—comes a major collection of essays on American art, American thought, and American life.
At each step of this journey through American history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real significance of William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the remarkable commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He uncovers the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, between the atomic bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the importance of Richard Wright, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, Laurie Anderson, and Rolling Stone. He explains why Norman Mailer doesn't get Madonna. He talks to Al Gore in the White House when the Starr Report is released, and to Maya Lin soon after the attack on the World Trade Center.
Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, it helps us understand why we think the way we do.
Reviews
Praise for American Studies
"Louis Menand is as comfortable sorting out the modernist universe of T.S. Eliot as he is dissecting the sex-saturated world of Larry Flynt . . . In American Studies, a collection of essays, Menand seeks to set us straight on everything from the relationship between pop music and the postwar middle class to the meaning of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial . . . His essay on Norman Mailer is a fine example of historical criticism at its best [and] Menand's analysis of the sex-obsessed culture of the 1970's and 80's is equally sharp: sexually explicit magazines and the 'televangelist fund-raising industry' were 'working opposite sides of the same street.' Menand is drawn to such ironies, uncovering the strange cultural logic of modern America."—Laura Ciolkowski, The New York Times
"[American Studies] represents the heart of Menand's work . . . and demonstrates his status as his generation's premier critical talent. It is easily among the finest collections of essays by an American critic since Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination . . . The skill is incomparable . . . He unites the spirit of roving amateurism with a patient, scholarly demeanor; he is very clever, without once looking up to see if you're laughing; and he has that rare ability to say something utterly fresh and unexpected, and yet to have it strike the reader as true on contact . . . His is a deep talent."—Stephen Metcalf, Los Angeles Times
"There are bright connecting threads running from one end of the collection to the other reflecting Menand's imaginative, incisive intellect, his contagious fascination with the interplay between people and ideas and his playful wit."—Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
"Menand asks us to look at our culture with an undeceived eye, and the force of his most potent arguments strips away the soothing deceptions and mirages at the heart of the way lwe live now."—Matthew Price, Chicago Tribune
"Fifteen essays: always intelligent, frequently interesting . . . Brilliant thinking . . . His intellectual range is limitless."—Kirkus Reviews
"This book collects some of the most cogent and clearly articulated . . . pieces, and reaffirms Menand's position as a preeminent historian of American liberalism's cultural incarnations."—Publishers Weekly
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BOOK EXCERPTS
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American Studies
William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient
1
In 1901, when he was fifty-nine, William James delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. James was an international...
About the author
Louis Menand
