11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Alfred Kazin of Our Day, August 25, 2004
This review is from: American Studies (Paperback)
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 is something about Menand's conclusory style that is off-putting, as though his opinions are the only valid ones. For example, he claims that Justice Holmes "was utterly, sometimes fantastically, indifferent to the real-world effects of his decisions," citing the infamous "stop-look-and-listen" ruling concerning automobiles at train intersections. I think there is plenty of evidence otherwise, and I'm reminded of the famous "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" opinion in Lochner v. U.S.
At his best, Menand can summarize a view in very few, well chosen words: "It is easy to appreciate [Maya Lin's] works as environmental installations....natural materials shaped in topological contours. It takes a little longer to see that they are also refinements on destruction...the Vietnam Memorial is made by repairing a large gash in the earth." He also reminds us of things important to remember: that Al Gore wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on the impact of television on the presidency, concluding that "because television loves one face over many faces its effect has been to increase the president's political power at the expense of Congress's."
I had also forgotten that during the 1992 campaign Bush Number I "tried to make it seem that Clinton was a traitor because he had gone to Moscow as a student in1969." This month marks the 50th anniversary of the famous statement by Joseph Welch in "Army vs McCarthy"--"Have you no decency, sir?" I remember it as a two-liner, the second being "Have you no sense of shame?" Clinton in Moscow was a campaign issue in 1992!
The most startling conclusion reached by Menand is that Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell really were on the same mission: to put the shame back into sex. The readers of Hustler Magazine also turn out to be members of Falwell's Moral Majority that claimed to have put Ronald Reagan into the White House. The chain of 7-Eleven stores sold 20% of all issues of Playboy, leading Menand to conclude that Falwell's TV audience of alienated lower class men was remarkably similar to the profile of the Hustler audience. When the Jim Bakker sex scandal brought him down during the anti-porn campaigns of the 80s, and 7-Eleven took Hustler and Playboy off its racks, it marked the demise of the culture of anything goes sexuality coincidental with the demise of the culture of televangelism. Mighty interesting.
Menand reviewed Eats, Shoots & Leaves in the New Yorker of 6/28/04, doing a carefully worded dismemberment of that sloppily written "punctuation text" written by a former sports columnist in caffeinated prose. He included an interesting digression about speaking versus writing: "The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. . . .As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. . . .[C]hattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as "like speech" are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. . . .Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. . . .Does this mean that the written "voice" is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. . . . Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer's control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice. . . .What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you're yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you're trying to transpose what you're thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they "meet the writer." The writer is not so surprised." . . .Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours re-reading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it's supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. . . . Sooner or later . . . the voice shows up, . . . and walks onstage."
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside Baseball But I Enjoyed Most Every Inning!, August 27, 2004
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 a mass readership. One reviewer here has called the writing "stilted." I could not agree less. Although as of this year a member of the Harvard faculty, he, like his colleague Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (also a contributor to the New Yorker), avoids academic jargon and writes most felicitously and well. I'm not sure about the discipline of "historical studies" but Menand is certainly one of its best practitioners.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Provocative and Insightful Essays, May 21, 2006
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.
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