SOURCE: Klein, Marcus. “A Jittery Outsidedness.” New Leader 81, no. 14 (14 December 1998): 20-2.

In the following review, Klein depicts Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer as an unoriginal continuation of Podhoretz's previous memoirs which rehashes the same arguments without providing additional insights.

You have to wonder why Norman Podhoretz wrote this book [Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer]. Twenty years ago, in Breaking Ranks, he told essentially the same story, naming the same names, with the same objective: to explain (or maybe to defend, or at any rate to trace) his journey from “liberal,” as he says, to “radical” to neocon. There is a narrowing in the present work, but with no resulting intensity. Here the principal “ex-friends,” at the rate of a chapter apiece, are Allen Ginsberg...