Ex-Friends

Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer

Norman Podhoretz (View Bio)
Hardcover: The Free Press, 1999; Paperback: Encounter Books, 2000.

"Turbulent brilliance." — Kirkus Reviews

"Readers who know Norman Podhoretz as an unrelenting controversialist will be surprised by how often he relents here. Though he judges his subjects as thinkers and people and finds them wanting, he also recollects them with affection and amusement (even amusement at this own expense).... Bliss was it in that crowd to be alive — an experience EX-FRIENDS conveys supremely well." — Richard Brookhiser, The New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating.... It is the individual stories of these falling-outs that make EX-FRIENDS such a textured intellectual history and lend the book its unusual spiciness.... [A] deliciously gossipy and scintillating recollection of our times." — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"Although the portraits in EX-FRIENDS are laced with rancor, they are also touched by a crusty, almost resisted tenderness.... Formidable though its author may be, EX-FRIENDS is not only immensely readable but even charming in places. Podhoretz writes a virile, off-hand prose that moves easily between novelistic scene-setting ...and savvy exposition." — Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker

"Absorbing reading." — Walter Kirn, New York

"[T]his book is as charming and intelligent and courageous as its author.... EX-FRIENDS is a gripping account of the drama of one of the great figures of American letters." — Conrad Black, The Wall Street Journal

"[Podhoretz] is among the last surviving witness-chroniclers of a fierce intellectual and cultural combat that few Americans even knew was going on." — Walter Goodman, The New York Times

"[Podhoretz] has set down a fierce and gossipy record of his expired relationships. His stories amount to a personal diary of American political ideas from the end of World War II to the present." — Lance Morrow, Time