Free World

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction
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.

Reviews

‘The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written’ New York Times
‘Like a great novelist, he creates a world’ Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books
‘Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do’ Marjorie Perloff, TLS
’The Free World is a finely balanced book: not a history of culture as a reflection of cold war ideology, but a history of the culture that happened all around it. A starry cast of characters – from George Orwell and John Lennon to Betty Friedan and Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt and Jack Kerouac – bring personality to one of the most fascinating periods in western culture whose ideas of freedom are still felt profoundly today’ Alex von Tunzelmann, Financial Times
‘The Free World is an engrossing and often revelatory book, a capacious, ambitious, and wonderfully crafted synthesis of intellectual and cultural histor’ Jack Hamilton, Slate
‘Menand is a genial hand-holder and amazingly good company’ Leo Robinson, Prospect
‘Masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research . . . I learned so much’ Mark Greif, The Atlantic
‘An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one’ Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post