The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

"Dinerstein has written a thoughtful and entertaining account of cool--the most powerful image of how one should be since the English gentleman dominated the world. It's a history, a handbook, and a manual, filled with fascinating accounts of those stellar individuals whose aggressively haughty, patrician coldness was rooted in hip opposition and revolt."--John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth "Dinerstein takes seriously the roots of cool. Rather than some kind of irresponsible, juvenile put-on or species of ill-earned irony, cool is shown to be a game played for the highest of stakes--personal survival in the face of the era's unconcealed racism and barbarity that gave the lie to western civilization's moral self-congratulation."--Benjamin Cawthra, author of Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz "These divisions, between white and black, Europe and America, individual and society, run through the history of cool and explain the different forms it takes and how these have evolved. . . . The history of post-war cool is both a history of these strange convergence--between French intellectuals, African American musicians and white working-class Hollywood heroes--and of the continuing conflicts between and within them. The real subject of Dinerstein's book is the debt that American culture owes to black art and style, and the way white America has responded to that debt."--Benjamin Markovits"Times Literary Supplement" (07/18/2017) "In his entertaining book, . . . Dinerstein shows that cool isn't just a style, it's an 'embodied philosophy' that is anchored in a specific generational circumstance. Cool was first of all a form of resistance and rebellion, a rejection of the innocence, optimism and consumer cheeriness that marked the mainstream postwar experience."--David Brooks "New York Times " "The Origins of Cool vibrates with the energy of its very subject--as restrained, composed, and revitalized as the postwar rebel himself. From the cafes of the existentialists to the bars of film noir, from Lester Young's sax to Elvis's pout, Dinerstein offers a brilliant exegesis of the simmering mode of resistance we call cool. He penetrates the meanings of a misunderstood mode--a concept, a mood, a posture--while connecting the rich details of art and culture to the deepest transformations of the postwar world. The Origins of Cool takes the elusive and inchoate and renders them clear and nearly tangible, making the reader feel this mysterious current of postwar culture as if for the first time. This is a masterwork."--Jefferson Cowie, author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America will be the standard reference for those who wish to understand the deep historical roots for coolness as a cultural style and ethos--a 'public mode of covert resistance, ' an expression of faith in the integrity and agency of the individual in the face of depression, war, occupation, segregation, and the threat of nuclear annihilation--rather than as a trendy pose or an emblem of hip consumerism. Dinerstein has achieved something like a unified field theory of the postwar American arts combined with a history of ideas attached to the quest for ethical renewal and existential affirmation."--John Gennari, author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics