Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Paperback

Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers--Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer--gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found sanctuary in the United States. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study--whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism--the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.