Norman Podhoretz

ISBN-13: 9780521198141 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 418 str.

Thomas L. Jeffers

Opis

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and after he broke ranks the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to unlearn much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life."

Recenzje

"Jeffers...skillfully weaves together these and other stories of Podhoretz's dramatic ascent to the peak of influence within the liberal intellectual world." -David Linker, New York Times

Spis treści

Prologue; 1. Brownsville; 2. Columbia; 3. Cambridge; 4. The family and the army; 5. The practicing critic; 6. Boss; 7. 'This was bigger than both of us'; 8. One shoe drops; 9. Dropping the other shoe; 10. Liberalism lost; 11. George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a lecture tour; 12. Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the question of America's nerve; 13. Moynihan, Podhoretz, and 'the party of liberty'; 14. Breaking and closing ranks; 15. Present dangers; 16. 'The great satan of the American romantic left'; 17. Regulated hatreds; 18. Culture wars; 19. A literary Indian summer; 20. Verdicts; 21. New wars for a new century; Epilogue.

O autorze

Jeffers, Thomas L. Thomas L. Jeffers, a Yale PhD and a Professor of Literature at Marquette University, earlier taught at Cornell and Harvard, where he was a Mellon Fellow. Author of Samuel Butler Revalued (1981) and Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (2005), he has also published pieces in numerous journals, including the Yale Review, the Hudson Review, Raritan, and Commentary. In 2004 he edited The Norman Podhoretz Reader, which provided the inspiration for this book.