Shares anecdotes about the author's significant literary battles, bringing alive such New York institutions as Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman.<br> <span>Allen
 Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hanna Arendt, Norman Mailer, and 
Lillian Hellman -among the other things these writers and intellectuals 
all had in common is Norman Podhoretz. With them Podhoretz was part of 
"The Family," as the core group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and
 60s came to be known. And in Ex-Friends, he has written the 
intellectual equivalent of a family history- a sparkling chronicle of 
affection and jealousy, generosity and betrayal, breakdowns and 
reconciliations, and ultimately of dysfunctions impossible to cure. 
Ex-Friends is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural 
icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman 
Podhoretz's career as a writer and editor and above all one of the 
leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another
 fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and 
bruised egos. Indeed, while Ex-Friends has some of the elements of a 
personal diary, it is also a journal de combat describing the 
intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how 
the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground 
where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this 
backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a 
trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped
 redefine America's intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 
20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends. If there 
is a nostalgia in Ex-Friends, it is not only for lost friendships but 
also for a time of wit, erudition, and passionate argumentation. Norman 
Podhoretz bodies forth a world when people still believed that what they
 thought and wrote and said could change the world.</span>  </br>

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

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