SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “Family Man.” National Review 51, no. 2 (8 February 1999): 51-2.

In the following review, Hart characterizes Ex-Friends as an insightful, deftly written collection that is part memoir, part cultural history, part psychology study, and part eulogy.

It is difficult to find the terms with which to describe all the excellences of this … well, what is it? [Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer] is autobiography, to be sure, but also important political and cultural history, an intense account of battles about ideas, of Norman Podhoretz's arguments with himself as well as with a set of vivid figures whom he portrays with the skill that could have made him a novelist. And like a good novelist, he succeeds in creating a world, yet one that really existed. Beyond its central subject—the epic conflict of his century between decent...