SOURCE: "Ciao! Manhattan," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXX, No. 1, February 3, 1983, pp. 5-6.

Brustein is an American educator and critic. In the following review of A Margin of Hope, Brustein focuses on Howe's ideas on politics and literature.

In what is left of the old community of New York intellectuals, we find writers trying to reconstruct and validate their pasts, while retaliating for old injuries and making conflicting claims about the intellectual disputes of the last few decades. Norman Podhoretz's Breaking Ranks and William Barrett's The Truants both deal very differently with some of the events and literary figures that Irving Howe describes in A Margin of Hope. At a time when this community has never been more bitterly split, Howe's "intellectual autobiography" provides valuable insights into how it fell apart, if not much hope for bringing about future amity.

That Howe is now able...