Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer

Rating:
Summary: It takes an egotist to know one
Review: Podhoretz, the man who recently said what's the big deal about a few thousand dead G.I.'s in Iraq considering what's at stake (without having a clue that nothing is at stake), Norman disparages the artist/intellectual/egotists of the 60's/70's that don't fall in line with his ideology while today he lauds the conservative egomaniacs that have brought our country to its low level of intellectualism and turned a nation founded by intellectual deists into a Disneyworld of McReligion. But it's all fine so long as we make the world safe for democracy. Norman seems to think there is something hypocritical about professing social justice and being a small time celebrity, when in fact, as Freud said, the partial motivation of any artist is fame and the love of women (speaking I assume of male artists). Einstein enjoyed the limelight; everyone enjoys the limelight. So to disparage the ones you don't happen to like is a bit disingenuous. The true irony is that only an attention-seeking egotist would write a book about such trivial nonsense. But this is all in keeping with a man who explains what writers should be writing if they only knew better, ex., he applauded James Baldwin's early career because he was on his way to being another Henry James; he condemns him when Baldwin's attention turned to racism in America. Imagine that: a black writer distraught over racism in America. The very idea! I think Norm's whole problem can be traced back to his youth, which he relates in his autobiography "Making It," talking about taking the subway to Manhattan, the son of modest working class parents, attending college, and rising among the ranks of the intellectual New York crowd. You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, etc., etc. Nowadays, Norm is comparing the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of Normandy, and explains that Iraq will become democratic by using as an analogy post-WW II Germany's transition to a modern democracy. How did this guy ever have friends to begin with???

Rating:
Summary: Unusual journey of an ex-Leftist intellectual in New York
Review: This highly readable book is going to be despised on the far left for exposing some of the key intellectual icons/godparents of the movement as insidious buffoons. A useful and brief companion book written years ago for some context would be Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic/Mau Mauing the Flakcatchers.