My Love Affair With America
The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative
(amazon)Norman Podhoretz (View Bio)
Hardcover: The Free Press, 2000.
Norman Podhoretz writes with candour and hence his commentaries on politics and our common culture are always engaging and thought-provoking. In this latest book, he looks at his own relationship with America, worked out through the political, artistic, and intellectual debates he has had with family, friends, and the intellectual circle he calls "The Family" over the course of his life. MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA is an elegant and passionately patriotic portrait of the value of America, as well as of Podhoretz's fifty intense years of intellectual arm-wrestling with the most important thinkers of our time, over what America is and ever should be.
"No voice has been louder than [Podhoretz's] in defending traditional American values...[n]ot that MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA is one long polemic. Mr. Podhoretz includes a richly detailed memoir....Think of him as akin to Muhammad Ali in his prime. His punches come not brutally but in intricate, ever-shifting combinations. At this level of literary pugilism, you'll keep your ringside seat." — The Wall Street Journal
"[E]ngaging lucidity and a crisp style.... [A] valuable record of one of the most vital periods in America's postwar coming of age." — Publishers Weekly