Pells

It refers to a large tract of land once owned by the Pells, but leaves the impression that the book is about, say, the 1949 Yankees.

2009 October 04 « One-Minute Book Reviews 2009

Undeniably true, though Pells fails to see that the movies' formal modernity is more often than not undercut by a preachy, moralising conventionality wholly at odds with the insurrectionary impulse of the avant garde.

Modernist America by Richard Pells – review 2011

In the end, Mr. Pells is so generous in his definition of Modernism that, if you accept his terms, it is hard to argue with his theory that America's cultural dynamism essentially became the most efficient way for the Western world to broadcast its changing values back to itself.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

American movies have been, as Mr. Pells discusses, the greatest influence on the world's culture for the better part of a century.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

Modernism is an "elastic" word, Mr. Pells acknowledges, and he is deliberately not distinguishing between high and low culture.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

When Mr. Pells turns to literary Modernism, he concentrates on novels instead of poetry.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

But as Richard Pells reminds us in "Modernist America," the Bauhaus theorists simply adopted the line from the American architect Louis Sullivan, the pioneer of the skyscraper, who proclaimed in 1896 that the appearance of a building should be dictated by its actual use.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

Her opera "Four Saints in Three Acts"—revolutionary and inexplicably popular during its 1934 Broadway run—captured on one stage the sort of cross-cultural pollination that Mr. Pells likes to extol.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

Still, Mr. Pells presents an engaging and detailed discussion of America's rise to domination of the global movie industry.

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011

Mr. Pells traces the many ways in which people outside the United States, "whether they worshiped Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Duke Ellington or Leonard Bernstein, Citizen Kane or The Godfather ," came to recognize that, "increasingly in the twentieth century, America was the land of both modernism and modernity."

Making It New in the New World Steven Watson 2011