Menand gives a lengthy but concise and penetrating sketch, both biographical and intellectual, of Sartre and Beauvoir. That is his modus operandi. Though there's plenty of connective tissue, the book essentially consists of a very large number of profiles of such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, David Riesman, Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, C. Wright Mills, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, I.A. Richards, Northrop Frye, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison, Pauline Kael, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Tom Hayden, as well as quite a few only slightly less luminous figures. In addition, there are many sketches, pretty full and mostly even-handed, of influential institutions, movements, and doctrines, such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, UNESCO's The Family of Man exhibit, "Action" painting, structuralism, the Beats, the New Criticism, deconstruction, Industrial Art, Cahiers du Cinéma, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the rise of the rock-and-roll industry, the rise of the paperback book industry (with special attention to Grove Press and Olympia Press), the Leo Castelli Gallery, the Vietnam War, and Bonnie and Clyde. It is possible to quibble with some of his judgments (as I'll do in a moment). But it's not possible, I'd say, to read the book without learning a vast amount about twentieth-century intellectual history.
Menand plays his cards pretty close to the vest, ideologically. He is however, notably indulgent toward eminent centrists. Kennan is one example; another is Isaiah Berlin.
Culture Magazine
