Last month, New York Review Books issued a 50th anniversary edition of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, a book Lee Smith has called a “masterpiece of American autobiography” that changed what it meant to be a public intellectual. “Nearly 50 years on,” Smith wrote, "it’s clear that, to paraphrase Dostoevsky on Gogol, we all come out from Podhoretz’s overcoat.”
The Tikvah Institute has described the book as “an intellectual earthquake.” It is by turns eloquent, perceptive, funny, and extraordinarily honest and well-written. And it is clear — from the conversation that Norman Podhoretz had with his son John Podhoretz last month at Tikvah — that its aftershocks continue. Fifty years after being written, it is still a book for our time.
This weekend, C-SPAN’s Book TV broadcast the conversation, with Eric Cohen, the Executive Director of the Tikvah Fund giving the program a brilliant introduction. It is worth watching in its entirety.
Terry Teachout’s Introduction to the re-issued book, and an excerpt from the first chapter, is here.
(Norman Podhoretz, right, in 1966 with Commentary editors Theodore Solataroff and Marion Magid)
Photo credit: New York Times, Gert Berliner