Norman Podhoretz is a great American success story—a poor Jewish kid from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, feisty and brilliant from a young age, lucky enough to find an eccentric high school
teacher who introduced him to the world of ideas, then off to Columbia University, where he was quickly on his way to being one of the leading literary critics of his generation. Which he became, at least for a while. Which he was, sort of.

Men of letters often care more for letters than for life; words, for them, are everything. But words were not enough for Podhoretz. For all his ideological twists and turns—ultimately leading him to become one of the most influential figures of neoconservatism from the 1970s to the present—he discovered early on that the craft of writing mattered most as the carrier of clear arguments about the best life, the best society, and the truths . . .

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