I had a distinctly middle-aged moment when I picked up the galley proof of Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends. The publisher’s blurb on the inside cover says: “[T]his memoir of some of the key intellectual battles of the last 30 years offers a rare, firsthand portrait of the New York intellectuals—’American Bloomsbury’ as they have been called—by one of the few surviving members.” […]
books
Posted inMagazine
Returning Fire in the P.C. War
This is supposed to be the riposte to all those bestselling conservative books attacking political correctness at universities—the shelf that begins with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which was published in 1987 and whose title Lawrence Levine has chosen to mirror. Levine, an eminent American historian, is at his best when he’s debunking the […]
Posted inMagazine
Making It, Part 2
This book sets off a psycho-physiological phenomenon called “reassurance-induced terror,” which can be defined roughly as the feeling you get when the pilot of the plane you’re riding in comes on the public address system to say that there’s nothing to worry about. Both the author, Bill Paul, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and his main […]
Posted inMagazine
The Wins of War
World War II would rank right at the top of the list of subjects most likely to defeat any attempt to fulfill the writer’s basic mission: “make it new.” The war is too immense (could it be the single most extensive human endeavor in the history of the world?) and too well written about already by […]
Posted inMagazine
Middle Class Hero
Letting his ego out for a trot, Kevin Phillips begins Boiling Point by observing that during last year’s presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Tom Harkin, Mario Cuomo, Jerry Brown, Lloyd Bentsen, Douglas Wilder, and Dick Gephardt all demonstrated that they had either read his last book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, “or drawn […]
Posted inJune 1991
On Political Books: Cliffhanging
How the consummate counsel came to need a lawyer
Posted inMagazine
Paradigm Lost
Every time a president of the United States proclaims himself to be in favor of returning power to states, cities, and neighborhoods, and opposed to our trying to solve national problems from Washington, he is echoing, probably unconsciously, a little book published in 1953 called The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet. Nisbet’s work is the […]
Posted inNovember 1990
On Political Books: Manhattan on the Rocks
Moderate black leaders could save New York from the Sharptons and the Brawleys
Posted inMagazine
Snob Rule
The main impression that arises from H. L. Mencken’s diaries is of the unlikelihood of their author as the leading American writer of his day. He was a man with no sympathy whatever for the national enterprise; in one typically dolorous entry, he says, “My grandfather, I believe, made a mistake when he came to […]
Posted inMarch 1988
Two Cheers for Tom Wolf
He vanquishes the vanities of the rich, but lacks the courage to say what he admires.
