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At each step of this journey through American cultural history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real need for William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the impressive commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He uncovers the bond between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, between the atom bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the value 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 general public.
Like his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, with a solid curiosity about the political underpinnings of ideas and about the reasons successful ideas insinuate themselves into the culture most importantly. From one of your 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 place down.
