Making It

(Paperback, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls "The Family," the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to Podhoretz's book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.

Reviews

"A frank and honest book...high-stepping brilliance...tactfully and touchingly revealing of the fearful ambitions of Podhoretzs family.... Podhoretz has allowed himself to be fully known and so may give the key to the B.Y.M. (Bright Young Men) of the next generation, which will allow them to shuck the iron mask of premature intellectual good taste and join in the common pursuit of self-knowledge and self-expression." Frederic Raphael, The New York Times

"This masterpiece of American autobiography is the tale of a striving, self-mythologized, and nearly Melvillean figure crashing toward his own salvationand more.... Nearly 50 years on, its clear that, to paraphrase Dostoevsky on Gogol, we all come out from Podhoretzs overcoat." Lee Smith, Tablet

"One cant really understand the state of so-called highbrow culture today without first coming to terms with the career of Norman Podhoretz. Along with Jason and Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and a few others (the children of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv), Mr. Podhoretz reconceived the very idea of what it means to be an intellectual." Robert S. Boynton, The New York Observer

"Making It was a brave and original book." Robert Fulford, The Globe and Mail

"Podhoretzs analysis of the power of the family is penetrating." Andrew M. Greeley, The Reporter

One cant really understand the state of so-called highbrow culture today without first coming to terms with the career of Norman Podhoretz. Along with Jason and Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and a few others (the children of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv), Mr. Podhoretz reconceived the very idea of what it means to be an intellectual.
The New York Observer

Author Bio

Norman Podhoretz is an author, editor, and political and cultural critic. He was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and has written several nonfiction books, including World War IV, The Prophets, Ex-Friends, and most recently Why Are Jews Liberal He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. He lives in New York City. Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. He has written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken, the libretti for three operas by Paul Moravec, and a play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, that has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.