Customer Reviews

Norman Podhoretz: A Biography

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While clearly distinguishing multiple strands in the literary, political, personal, and spiritual life of neoconservative author and Commentary editor (1955-1995) Norman Podhoretz, this elegant biography imitates his pugnacious attempt to grasp and shape those strands entire. It is a formidable attempt and largely succeeds. While small-scale skirmishes in NY literary salons and larger conflicts shaping a neo-liberal (a label Jeffers persuasively argues is more apt than neocon) politics occasionally threaten to overwhelm the larger narrative, Jeffers' prose and careful selections help the reader to continue to see the larger story.
From a 1970 spring epiphany to a multitude of friendships forged, stretched, and shattered (Trilling, Mailer, Baldwin, Moynihan), Jeffers clearly connects Podhoretz's personal and spiritual life to his writing, editing, and politics. You need not agree with any, much less all of Podhoretz's judgments to appreciate his story and its telling. The canvas as well as the portrait is larger: a fine account of an attempt to speak, work, hate, love, and live with integrity through fractured times. Anyone seeking insight into the tumult and legacy of our recent American past can read it with interest and profit.

A first-rate treatment of a major American literary and political figure. Jeffers is especially adept at providing the political contexts--over decades--of Podhoretz' thought. His skill at reconstructing the history of political issues is exceptional. Without these accounts, one would not be able to understand the dialectical responses of Podhoretz to the major ideas of his time. Jeffers' prose is adroit and smoothly presented. He makes complicated intellectual positions clear and presentable with a minimum of technical academic terminology.

A model biography, impressively organized and written .

Robert Kirschten, Ph.D.,
Director of Creative Writing,
Prairie View A&M University