Norman Podhoretz "is a thinker and writer and polemicist, a
geopolitician and student of religious ideas, an autobiographer of
genius, a man who reacts sharply to the news as it pours from the
press and the airwaves, who thinks deeply, angrily, and sincerely
about it, and commits his thoughts into vivid and penetrative
argument."
So writes the eminent British historian Paul Johnson in his
introduction to this indispensable collection of Norman Podhoretz's
essays of the past fifty years. Organized by decade, these essays,
fascinating in themselves, also add up to a running history of
American literature and intellectual life in the second half of the
twentieth century. From Vladimir Nabokov to Saul Bellow, from Ralph
Ellison to Norman Mailer, from Hannah Arendt to Henry Kissinger,
Podhoretz has dealt with the most important novelists and thinkers
of the period. He has also turned his attention to such major
European figures as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and
Isaiah Berlin, and his trenchant appraisals of both Americans and
Europeans are as fresh and lively today as when they first
appeared. Many of them have been unavailable for years, and will
prove revelatory for first-time readers and longtime admirers
alike.
The New York intellectuals, of whom Podhoretz is the archetype,
loved to read and discuss literature, but they never stopped
arguing about politics. Intertwined with the literary essays, "The
Norman Podhoretz Reader" offers some of the best and most
influential political essays written by anyone in our time. Through
such classics as ""My" Negro Problem -- and Ours," his famous
reassessments in "Why We Were in Vietnam," and his retrospective
look at neoconservatism (of which he was one of the founding
fathers), Podhoretz has led and changed opinion throughout his
career.
In addition to all this, "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" includes
self-contained excerpts from the books "Making It, Breaking Ranks,"
and "Ex-Friends" that demonstrate why Johnson calls Podhoretz "an
auto- biographer of genius." Taken together, these readings provide
a rich sample of the work of one of America's great contemporary
men of letters -- an extraordinary writer who is equally
comfortable discussing the Marquis de Sade and the Middle East,
American foreign policy and theological disputes, and who brings
the same vigor, intelligence, and literary grace to this amazingly
broad range of subjects and issues.
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