Eduardo Suárez
Head of Comms at @risj_oxford. Co-founder of @politibot & @elespanolcom. Bylines @niemanreports @washingtonpost @el_pais. @elmundoes alum. García Márquez Award
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Eduardo Suárez
“This book by L. Menand is an incredible work of cultural history. Through its pages you'll find Elvis, Sartre, Kennan, Pollock, Warhol, Cage, Goddard and Kerouac, and a fascinating overview of the many ways in which America engaged with the world between 1945 and 1968. Must read https://t.co/xy8WbGOvTd” (from X)
Louis Menand(you?)
Louis Menand(you?)
"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
Recommended by Eduardo Suárez
“@wblau It's such a wonderful book. I particularly love the chapter on the Messiah's composition. A masterpiece” (from X)
The factors that change the course of history are primarily the product of the contributions made by individual lives to the broad pattern of mortal existence. In his collection of 'historical miniatures,' Stefan Zweig celebrates the monumental power of the spirit to discover, to create, to transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment, while at the same time underlining man's inability to escape from the realities of his own nature. Among Zweig's illustrations of decisive moments in human experience are the stories of a siege during which seventy ships are moved across a mountainous headland in a single night, a love affair between a seventy-four-year-old poet and a nineteen-year-old girl, and a man who legally owned much of the state of California, only to have it taken from him because the government would not defend his rights. .
Recommended by Eduardo Suárez
“@joyjenkins @AEJMCMagMedia Not a piece but a book. One of the best profiles I've read is 'Our Man' by George Packer on American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Absolute masterpiece https://t.co/JjthXwZnvN” (from X)
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.