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by: Louis Menand
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780374529000
ISBN: 0374529000
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: November 01, 2003
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 505942
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
At each step of this journey through American cultural 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 atom bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the importance of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, and Rolling Stone magazine. And he lends an ear to Al Gore in the White House as the Starr Report is finally presented to the public. Like his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, with a strong curiosity about the political underpinnings of ideas and about the reasons successful ideas insinuate themselves into the culture at large. From one of our leading thinkers and critics, known both for his 'sly wit and reportorial high-jinks [and] clarity and rigor' (The Nation), these essays are incisive, surprising, and impossible to put down.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Rare Sensibility: A Switzerland of Good Sense
I'm new to Menand. American Studies is my first Menand tome. First impression: this is a guy who is not as interested in his own ideas/habits/tastes/opinions as he is in understanding why he holds those ideas/habits/tastes/opinions. Its quite clear that Menand thinks what he thinks because he is the child of American academics of a particular time and place (the ideological schisms of the fifties and the cultural schisms of the sixties) and as a result he is skeptical of intellectual life, and ... Read More
Rating:  - Better then an Adam Sandler movie
This collection of essays from Louis Menand covers a range of topics in 20th century American history. The historical minded essay on William James strips a popular narrative of crisis and triumph to reveal a more pedestrian reality of daily struggles. The other essays are more culturally minded, the best being about the correlation between Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt. The subjects are interesting enough to warrant reading, even if the author's point is occasionally unclear.
Rating: - Provocative and Insightful Essays
American Studies is a compilation of essays on contemporary American lives by the wonderful essayist and critic Louis Menand. What a treasure this man is!
He writes on subjects like William James, Pauline Kael, Al Gore, James Conant, and Norman Mailer with wit, insight, and surprising originality.
Menand is the kind of writer people will be reading 100 years from now, and readers then will say, "wow, this guy really nailed it." Give yourself the treat of this wonderful book.
Rating: - Inside Baseball But I Enjoyed Most Every Inning!
I had only read a couple of the essays in this collection when they first appeared in the NYReview of Books, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. As the amorphous title of the book suggests, its sum is not much greater than its parts, and yet I found most of the parts completely engaging and very rewarding. The pieces on Justice Holmes, James Bryant Conant, Al Gore, Bill Paley, and the New Yorker magazine itself were perhaps the best, although I admit that it's pretty much Bos-Wash stuff and may not appeal to ... Read More
Rating:  - The Alfred Kazin of Our Day
Menand, Louis, American Studies. New York: FSG, 2002.
The topics covered by this uneven group of essays run from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell. Menand also has things to say about William James, T.S. Eliot, The New Yorker, Bill Paley of CBS, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, Maya Lin, and "the mind of" Al Gore. Although I did a good deal of underlining--a lot of it trying to make sense of his comments about Christopher Lasch's philosophy against liberalism--there ... Read More
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