Word: podhoretzes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suit his purposes. Confronting hate-mongers is not the sole province of the left, accepted wisdom in Cambridge notwithstanding. Buchanan's bigotry is not a figment in the imagination of liberals: His anti-Semitic ranting has been denounced by leading conservatives like William Buckley and Norman Podhoretz...
...reason Shalit is garnering so much attention has to do with, well, who she is: a petit, pretty 23-year-old who has already been labeled brilliant by the likes of conservative icon Norman Podhoretz. The youngest of three sisters from a suburb of Milwaukee, Wis., Shalit first gained national attention in 1995 as a sophomore at Williams College, when she wrote a piece for Commentary (later reprinted in Reader's Digest) attacking the school's coed bathrooms. But her precocity did not necessarily make her Miss Popularity. Her conservative views made her so despised by many on campus that...
...worst he has to say about Lionel Trilling, whom he considers the most intelligent person he ever met, is that he lacked a certain political courage, taking refuge always in his favorite word, complicated. Everything was complicated, Trilling would insist, his emphasis lingering on the first syllable. Of Hellman, Podhoretz finds surprisingly pleasant things to say--she was a wonderful cook, she was great company, "playful, mischievous, bitchy, earthy, and always up for a laugh." But her extraordinary lies (the "Julia" story, for example) and her habit of self-glorification--herself presented as saint and martyr in the memoirs...
...relationship with Mailer was, as Trilling might have said, complicated. Podhoretz felt that Mailer, like Ginsberg, made an artistic pose of excess--too much of his work being merely a sort of riot against normality. Podhoretz stood up for Mailer after the novelist stabbed his wife Adele in the course of a fight at a party in 1959, but the two men parted company at last because they wound up on different sides of too many cultural and ideological barricades...
...recent years Podhoretz has struck bystanders as dyspeptic and contentious, and in debate as single-minded as a dog with his teeth sunk into a mailman's calf. Mailer has said that in the old days Podhoretz was a merrier man. Perhaps years of contrarian outrage have grimmed down the merriness. But the admirable Podhoretz has always lived by the gospel according to George Orwell: "The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive...