SOURCE: Sleeper, Jim. “Yankee Doodle Dandy: Making It in America While Breaking Ranks and Settling Scores.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 July 2000): 6-8.

In the following review, Sleeper recognizes that Podhoretz is attempting to illuminate a plan for America's ideological future in My Love Affair with America but argues that Podhoretz's message is overrun by his own small-mindedness and inflexibility.

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The truculent conservative writer and editor Norman Podhoretz “did not … fight his way out of ‘political leftism’ to abide ‘the anti-Americanism of the Right,’” writes Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the cover of this new book: “It is America he loves, not ideology.” Thus encouraged, any reader might well open My Love Affair with America expecting to hear a voice of civic conscience that has been missing in this country's ideologically riven, and increasingly inane, politics. Having broken ranks with what he called the “hate America” left...