I bought this one because I use to read Louis Menand regularly in the New Yorker. In a way, Menand might be the consummate New Yorker writer. He's an essayist who writes for people who don't have the time to sit down and read, say, Martin Heidegger or Gilles Deluze cover-to-cover or to read every interview Richard Serra ever gave but who still want to know more about interesting thinkers, artists and writers. In addition, he does it in prose that's precise, efficient, wonderfully readable, and often slyly humorous. Menand, like many New Yorker writers, is a master of what you might call the high-middlebrow. That's not a criticism, mind you: Menand is certainly insightful about his subjects, but he also wants to be approachable. He has no intention of writing for a closed circle of fellow academics, and God bless him for that.

Menand is what you might call a big-picture guy. Most of the essays in "American Studies" try to place their subjects in context: where they stand in relation to their contemporaries, to the development of ideas, to the societies in which they lived. It's not surprising, then, that the passage of time is often his most useful tool. Menand's interested, first and foremost, in ideas -- not in history in and of itself -- but it's looking back that gives Menand the clarity that makes a lot of these essays really special. Menand doesn't argue for or against his subjects as much as he wants to figure out what they really meant in the grand scheme of things. I'm tempted to think that he comes close to hitting the mark on a number of occasions here.

The essays I found most memorable here were the ones on Maya Lin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, funnily, enough, Rolling Stone magazine. For all his perspicacity, Menand's interests are nothing if not broad. His essay on T.S. Eliot is also noteworthy, as it tries to untangle the puzzle of the author's reputed antisemitism without resorting to hyperbole or reflexively falling back on the undeniable quality of Eliot's output. "Christopher Lasch's Quarrel with Liberalism" also impressed me. In it, Menand tries to give that famously grating polemicist with whom he obviously disagrees on, well, just about everything, a fair shake. That the essay succeeds is a testament to the author's intellectual abilities and versatile mind. That Menand made its subject seem genuinely interesting to me is a testament to his considerable gifts as a writer. Recommended. ( )

Excellent. One of America's best writers. ( )

Very good!

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/2004/08/american-studies-2/ ( )