As if on cue, one did." "She was a handsome woman, and she had a boyfriend." "The French had their own way of reading American fiction and their own understanding of what it was about." "When Sartre got back to Paris in May 1945, the city had changed." "Arendt was precocious." He was authentic and inauthentic at the same time." "The émigré was Hans Gerth, who had been educated at Heidelberg, where he knew Hannah Arendt, who was writing her doctoral dissertation, and Frankfurt, where he knew Arendt's first husband Günther Stern, who was writing his thesis." "Paris had enormous political significance, however." "Everything was set for a new culture hero to walk onto it. It raised the stakes." "Orwell read Joyce and kept a goat in the backyard. And they did." "The Cold War changed the atmosphere. "With their enemies defeated and their armies no longer in the field, the United States and the Soviet Union could disagree openly about the design of the postwar map. But each sentence can also be savored as a distinctive lesson in how not to write. (Note: pronouns have been replaced by names in some cases.) I’m going to quote sentences, in the order in which they appear in the book. You can take the whole thing as a plot summary. ![]() "I focus on the headliners," he says, "the artists and thinkers who became most widely known." And he focuses on telling the most familiar stories about them (though Menand displays no gift for narrative). There will be no surprises. "The dots do connect," he assures us, but by the time my eyes traversed that last page (727), swimming dots were all I saw.įlummoxed by how to characterize this heap, I’ll take the following approach. When deciding whether to commit to reading the publisher's proof of The Free World, I should’ve taken Menand's words in the preface a bit more seriously. It doesn’t impose any particular order on the material as a whole: it doesn’t amount to an interpretation, much less a fresh interpretation, of the myriad developments it does little more than mention. Its prose is hackneyed. ![]() It covers government policies, wars here and there, and social movements and it covers paintings, novels and essays. It gives hundreds of tiny biographies (though it more or less entirely omits Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans). It assembles the least controversial and most conventional portions of many other peoples' research. Menand's tome begins after the Second World War and ends up in Vietnam, though there was a lot of Cold War to go after that. Bass Professor of English at Harvard), and a publishing house as reputable Farrar, Straus, and Giroux could produce a book this bad. By the time you force your way through or over, you'll be too thoroughly buried to get a decent view of the terrain. It's hard to believe that a writer as reputable as Menand (the Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Anne T. ![]() If you want your horror sci-fi movies neat and tidy and pedestrian this probably isn't for you.Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War amounts to a hill of beans: a gargantuan heap, mound, or pile, each bean being a capsule biography or mini-narrative giving the most conventional possible interpretation of the usual developments. But it was also really kick ass and I'd see it again in a heartbeat. I thought the complex relationship of the couple and their creation was skillfully rendered and and excellently acted. I like that the film doesn't pull punches and I like that there are consequences for the actions of the scientists. The film addresses many scientific issues, but does so with a moral and emotional center. The actress that played Dren was also strong and had the perfect mix of human, alien, and innocence. I saw it for Sarah Polley as she is one of my favorite actors and one of the most underrated ones out there today. ![]() The performances of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley were exemplary, as always. I think it took a familiar premise and retooled it. Well of COURSE they made idiotic decisions! Where's the film if they made perfectly sane decisions? What kind of film is that? I actually thought the film was effing brilliant. Three fourths of these reviews hate the movie and whine about the idiot decisions of the scientists.
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