Louis Menand

Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains...

"Narrator David Colacci approaches this opinionated, engrossing audiobook with a practiced voice that lets its numerous stories tell themselves without fanfare...this audiobook is a monumental work." (AudioFile Magazine) In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis...

What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? What's the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism? Why doesn't Norman Mailer "get" Madonna? And who else but Louis Menand would describe former Vice...

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles...

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems...