American Studies: Essays

by Louis Menand

Brilliant, surprising insights into America yesterday and today from the "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Metaphysical Club."
What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? What's the connection between Larry Flynt's "Hustler" and Jerry Falwell's evangelism? Why doesn't Norman Mailer "get" Madonna? And who else but Louis Menand would describe former Vice President Al Gore as "a holist, a post-postmodernist, and a goo-goo"?
At each step in his latest journey through American culture history, Menand has an original point to make. Like" The Metaphysical Club, American Studies"--is game and detached, with a strong curiosity about the reasons ideas insinuate themselves into the culture at large. Menand explores the rise and fall of the TV network, the importance of Richard Wright, Pauline Kael, and "Rolling Stone," and why we dropped the bomb. He lends an ear to Al Gore in the White House as the "Starr Report" is presented to the public. And he makes us look more closely at our world and ourselves.
From one of our leading thinkers and critics, known for his "sly wit and reportorial high-jinks...clarity and rigor" "(The Nation)," these essays are incisive, thought-provoking, and compelling--intellectual and cultural history at its best.

Genres: History, Essays, Nonfiction, American, Literary Criticism, Collections, American History

1 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Typical Menand. Well written studies of writers and media, touching on weightier topics in cultural history.

[Danny Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a masterpeice. Each chapter is basically a biography of that chapter's subject, but this book is so much more. It shows the common thread that tethers characters as disparate as T.S. Eliot, Pauline Kael, Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt. I'm not going to write some highfalutin statement like: "And that common thread...is America." But there is something singularly American about every one of these people. The visionary amibition, relentless drive, and unquashable self-belief, but also a certain brand of fatalism. David Gilmour calls it "fuck it land." There is a defiance to the idea that "if I can't do what I want to do, there's no point in me doing OR being."
In America, you are what you do, but that doesn't always mean people attach a materialistic value to their occupations. Sometimes it truly is a calling, so reading about how these individuals raised the tents of their respective institutions is fuckin fascinating.

I'm a Canadian, but I love American history, American culture, and America itself. I love the idea of America and the actual America. Route 66, the lonliest lighthouse in the world smack dab in the centre of Lake Superior, desert highways running to the horizon, fields meadowed to the sky, the silver streak of Greyhounds, coffee at 3AM, the vulgarity and the pulse, the heart and the head.

Menand has a grand yet conversational style that perfectly suits his material. I can't wait to read more of this guy. He's like the interesting old man at the library who knows a billion random historical facts. And he knows them because he was there.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given how much I normally enjoy Menand's articles in The New Yorker and elsewhere, I was surprised by how uneven I found this collection. In particular, many of the early essays (concerning historical personages) dragged and left me entirely uninterested in the people they described (if possible, less interested than I was prior to having read them). His bits on The New Yorker's history as well as his profiles of some of its most notable writers (e.g. Pauline Kael) are, on the other hand, charming to read and reveal some amazing tidbits including the fact that New Yorker cartoons were originally devised to insure that subscribers would, at the very least, leaf through their entire issue (thus making advertisers' investments worthwhile). Additionally, the famously inscrutable captions to said cartoons were initially written not by the illustrators, but by the magazine's writers themselves. Similarly, Menand's profiles of Al Gore and Maya Lin (both reprinted from the New Yorker) are full of equally compelling snippets, making even these well-known subjects come to life in the reader's eye. In short, I would say this is worth picking up, but if a particular essay doesn't interest you after the first few pages, you may as well skip ahead.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent panorama of "high culture" of twentieth-century America. Like much intellectual history, some of this was over my head, but that says more about me than Menand's work. The best essays are those on James Conant, Norman Mailer, Maya Lin, Richard Wright, and Pauline Kael. Highly recommended.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to write a review of this colletion of essays all written before 2002. I have a terrible literary crush on Mennand which started only a few years ago with the publication of The Free World, his take on the ascendancy of American culture during the post-WWII decades which I can't praise highly enough. I have been following the trail of his references ever since. I then immediately read his earlier, Pulitzer prize winning book, The Metaphysical Club which treats American thought and culture during, and following, the Civil War. Brilliant.

This collection of essays is uneven. Not because of Mennand's skill as a writer, which is never less the impressive, but more because of the choice of subjects. After twenty years values and tastes change as he would no doubt point out. All the essays deal with an American or American cultural icon, emblematic of either the post-civil war or post-WWII periods. I expect all essays came into being as offshoots of his research for the two major books I mentioned. It is a diverse collection of people and some are just more interesting than others. Rather than capitulate the entire group, let me particularly recommend the essays on Willian S. Paley, Pauline Kael, and the New Yorker. The others all have something to recommend them, but these three really stood out for me.

[Christy-JC Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do like Menand, but it was so dense that I skimmed around. I liked the Maya Lin piece at the end best. I like that he is writing about people I know I should know more about - - Norman Mailer, TS Eliot,Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was hard to absorb everything here, though. Definitely not a quick read, but potentially a good resource to return to when I need more on a certain period or a person.

[kevin kvalvik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Menand is a voice in the wilderness as he defines pop culture and the human condition I am crazy about this guy.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Smart guy; fine writing. Enjoyed the discussions of Rolling Stone and William Paley, but Larry Flynt? Overall, just okay.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always come away feeling a little smarter (not that it takes much) after reading Menand, because, in explaining the cultural significance of people or events, he reveals connections and relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. To me, anyway. Like, that a guy who played a big role in dropping the atomic bombs in WW2 also is the father of the SAT test.

Or in other cases, you get the story behind the story. Everyone knows rock music has been used to sell products for years. In Menand's essay you get a glimpse of how that came about.

And although some of his essays can be ponderous, at least he's trying to entertain you (at least mildly), such as in his essay on William Paley, the longtime head of CBS: "(Today) you can watch programs on which pickup trucks with oversized tires are driven across rows of parked cars, and programs on which naked people discuss sex in a manner so unstimulating as to make you turn back to watch the pickup trucks. There is always sport, and most of the local teams' games are available. There are (since the arrival of Fox, in 1986) five 'over the air' networks, and one or more 'superstations,' beamed into the system by satellite. There is still, it's true, nothing to watch, but you can turn to Channel 3 and put a rented movie in your videocassette or DVD player."

[haetmonger]

"[Pauline] Kael never gave anyone credit for good intentions. “Art,” as she put it back in 1956, “perhaps unfortunately, is not the sphere of good intentions.” She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it ddoes have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover—which is why nothing irritated Kael more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform. “If a lady says, ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’ ” she explained to the readers of Holiday in 1966, “that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.” She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair were either lying or were guilty of sex-in-the-head. There were a lot of people like that around before 1967. “What did she lose at the movies?” asked a puzzled Dwght Macdonald when he reviewed I Lost It at the Movies, in 1965. Case in point."

[Zachary Stevenson]

Not as impressive as "The Metaphysical Club," but the William James essay alone is probably worth the price of the book. The piece on T.S. Eliot's relationship to Judaism is also worth reading. All the other entries are well-written without being particularly memorable.

"For 'New Yorker' readers, though proud of their education and their taste, were intellectually insecure. They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them. They were intelligent people who were nevertheless extremely wary of being out-browed. The 'New Yorker' was enormously attentive to this insecurity" (181).

"The Vietnam Memorial is a piece about death for a culture in which people are constantly being told that life is the only thing that matters. It doesn't say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn't say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die" (277).

[SVG · Rating 4 out of 5]

menand's "american studies" is a collection of several of his new yorker essays greatly in need of sequels--not for what they lack, but for what many essayists lack: profundity.

menand's talent is in the way he perfectly describes american culture and thought without addressing it directly. with well-crafted, glancing blows, menand creates an image of the US by both building and subtracting from an abstract form called "Americana."

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays (some of which appeared in the New Yorker) is hit-and-miss. The entries on William Paley, Richard Wright, Larry Flynt and the New Yorker itself interesting and well-contextualized. Some of the others though: particularly the essay on Oliver Wendell Holmes, I found irritating, even glib.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fan of Menand's writings in the New Yorker, I had gone into the bookstore looking for The Metaphysical Club but wound up with this instead. It was a good, but dense read across diverse and somewhat random subject matter. Having finished it, here's the thing that sticks in my mind: Native Son author Richard Wright wrote over 4,000 haiku. And he was a Nietzchean. Must have been some haiku.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this book on several short trips. It is a series of essays about Americans who have made significant contributions to American culture. (Some good, some not so good). The analysis that the author takes is, In some cases, unique. Very thought provoking.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Must read - 1
Kept my attention - 3
Meaningful - 3

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I skipped the law bits: this cat can write! Even if I didn't care about tort reform, I liked how he walked us through his massive and obscure bibliography.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great analysis of Norman Mailer and William James. The chapter on Al Gore, written in 1998, is painful to read with 2010's perspective.

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, accessible essays. Worth reading for the Rolling Stone creation myth alone.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

essays on pauline kael, oliver wendell holmes, al gore (via 2002? oh, it is just sickening), maya lin. very good writer and analysis.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy can WRITE. The collection was a little uneven, but the pieces that are strong carry it. I especially loved the piece on Al Gore and Rolling Stone/the 1960s.

[sunspot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. One of America's best writers.

[Isaac]

read select essays, which vary in quality. most interesting are the first two, on oliver wendell holmes and william james