Making It by Benjamin Moser

Making It by Benjamin Moser

A controversial memoir about American intellectual life and academia and the relationship between politics, money, and education.

Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia University 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 the 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.

Norman Podhoretz was the editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years and is now the magazine's editor-at-large and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of nine books on topics ranging from modern literature to foreign policy. He received a Pulitzer Scholarship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and five honorary doctorates after graduating from Columbia and Cambridge universities. He and his writer wife, Midge Decter, live in New York City.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781681370804
ISBN 10	1681370808
Title	Making It
Author	Benjamin Moser
Series	Nyrb Classics Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2017-04-11
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.