Norman Podhoretz

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.

Author: Thomas L. Jeffers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/14/2010
Pages: 418
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.56lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.40w x 1.24d
ISBN: 9780521198141

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 03/26/2010 pg. 18
New York Times Book Review 08/01/2010 pg. 20
Library Journal 08/01/2010 pg. 83
Booklist 09/01/2010 pg. 20
Choice 02/01/2011

About the Author
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.