Making It

by Norman Podhoretz

Book by Podhoretz, Norman

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Essays, Politics, Jewish, 20th Century

360 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1967

About the author

Norman Podhoretz is an American neoconservative writer and editor.

Reviews

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once he gets done reading us his high school and college transcripts, Norman Podhoretz does an admirable job of taking us into the literary world of the 1950s. He uses an autobiographical approach to explore universal ideas – but as a result (something he wouldn’t have anticipated) his book is best when it is not about him.

Now back to those annoying academic transcripts. About 80 of Making It’s first 100 pages are not enjoyable. For all the insight that Podhoretz would eventually show in his criticism of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March – that so much of its prose and story is “willed” – Podhoretz spends at least a quarter of his own book willing literary greatness on himself. Most of the first part of the book effectively says this: “Would you believe a person with my GPA hasn’t produced great work since graduating from college 15 years ago? You’re right; I can’t believe it either!”

Eventually, mercifully, Podhoretz begins getting choice assignments in literary criticism. He writes for The New Yorker and Partisan Review and Commentary. All of this is quite important to “the family” – and if you don’t know who that is, if names like Trilling and Cohen don’t inform your every literary taste, well, where have you been? “The family” must have been preternaturally important in its day, as young Podhoretz – a prodigy, he’s happy to remind you unfailingly throughout the book – wanted nothing more than to attain invitations to “the family’s” dinner parties.

Much of this is done with irony. Much of Podhoretz’s autobiographical work is a caricature of a self portrait. He presents his monstrous ambition as exactly that – probably exaggerating it some. He uses his own weakness for power and fame to plumb literary types’ actual motivations. He concludes by blessing Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself as a work of authenticity and genuine literary merit.

Again, 40 years after its publication, Making It is no longer relevant for the people whom young Podhoretz once impressed (many are no longer even in print). But it is absolutely relevant for what it reveals about the motivations that inform literary decisions. Chief among which is pettiness. It is a bizarre world, this literary one, that sees persons define their identities by what others opine of their tastes. It is a miracle that any actual literature ever gets produced. But then, does it ever really get produced by the cocktail set?

For this reason, young Podhoretz rightfully praised young Mailer. For once an ambitious writer was anxiously participating in the spoils of his fame. Mailer wasn’t furrowing his brow and worrying about what the assistant junior editor of the new anti-anti-Communist magazine (and magazines with circulations of 1,000 or so were what these literary folks were endlessly conspiring to produce) thought of his loud personality. Mailer was too busy living the life of a careless rogue – before going home and producing 700-page works.

Meanwhile the rest of them, and Podhoretz too at times, were too busy cultivating their images as “people who write” to find time for actual writing.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I strongly identified with Podhoretz at first, a high school student from an unbookish and unintellectual home in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section who nevertheless has developed a strong interest in literature. For three years Podhoretz is taken under the wing of “Mrs K”, an English teacher of

altogether outspoken snobbery, which stopped short by only a hair, and sometimes did not stop short at all, of an old fashioned kind of patrician anti-Semitism.

Later, on his single visit to Mrs K’s home, he discovers that her husband is Jewish “But not, as Mrs. K. quite unnecessarily hastened to inform me, my kind of Jewish)”.

Though Mrs K takes Norman to various Manhattan art museums and once to the theater, a dramatization of The Late George Apley, Podhoretz does not credit her with informing his taste in artistic matters. Rather her project, as he explains it, was to prepare him socially for the sort of career she had determined he was cut out for by his strong interest in and feeling for literature. He speaks of resisting her efforts at refashioning his speech, manners, and diet, but admits she ultimately succeeded for the most part in re-making him. He sees this transformation as something of a betrayal of his family and heritage, not only the non-kosher meals she orders for him in restaurants, but even in the suit she offers to purchase for him “to wear at your Harvard interview”.

How could I explain to Mrs. K. that wearing a suit from di Pinna would for me have been something like the social equivalent of a conversion to Christianity?

That’s only the first of 10 chapters that see Podhoretz, via scholarships and grants, through Columbia and Cambridge Universities (studying under F. R. Leavis), into the Manhattan literary world of the 1950s (interrupted by being drafted into a two year stint in the army) and ultimately, as the memoir’s title indicates, to worldly success as editor of Commentary.

He spends one of those chapters giving the backstory of the group of mostly Jewish Manhattan-based intellectuals, editors and writers associated with Partisan Review, Commentary, and their various offshoots, that pretty much form the alpha and omega of his professional life, a group he refers to throughout the book as “the family”, and in the narrative they effectively replace his real family, who disappear from the narrative after his return for Cambridge.

Podhoretz makes his bones with the family by writing a negative review for Commentary of Saul Bellow’s newly published The Adventures of Augie March, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Bellow was part of the family and the novel was otherwise highly lauded within the group, Delmore Schwartz saying “in Partisan Review that Augie March was a greater novel than Huckleberry Finn”.

During my youth I used to hear the admonition, “Don’t just stand there, make yourself useful.” As I progressed through this book I began to think of an intellectual as someone who sees their raison d'être as standing there and not making themselves useful. This becomes fairly explicit at the point in the early sixties when some members of the family, including Podhoretz, are invited to Washington DC during the Kennedy administration to talk about practical solutions to various social problems. They have plenty of theories, but offer nothing that could conceivably result in concrete policies. Podhoretz disdainfully calls the desire for implementable policy idea, "the suggestion box".

The last chapter is devoted to Podhoretz reveling in his success and, as he refers to it “fame”; he distinguishes this from “celebrity” and admits it’s limited in its reach, but still seems overly smug about it. He feels that this success entitles him to live large and he disdains the advice of John Thompson to “think poor” as a way for those earning a living in the arts in Manhattan to avoid falling into overspending in emulating the lifestyle of fashionable wealthy with whom they often associate. Podhoretz’ conversion in this matter seems to have occurred as a result of a five day expense paid stay at a luxury Caribbean resort on privately owned Paradise Island as part of a symposium hosted by Show magazine, funded by millionaire Huntington Hartford. This tendency to self-identify with the behavior of the very wealthy no doubt foreshadows Podhoretz’ turn away from the generally leftist politics he espouses in Making It into the extreme conservatism for which he is now best known.

Though first sentence of Chapter One is

One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan – at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.

in his success Podhoretz never looks back at Brownsville, and though in the first part of the book he often refers of his transition from one social milieu to the other as a “conversion”, he also never appears to consider that he has given anything up or incurred any losses in effectively abandoning his Brownsville family for his “family” of intellectuals. The man has become the di Pinna suit.

The author is 35 and at the height of his career when the book ends, so perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect anything like a “Rosebud” moment, though if anything it looks even less likely at age 90.


Louis Menand in the New Yorker on this re-issue of the memoir.

This book contributed further observations on the nature of taste, along with previously the read books Fiction And The Reading Public and The Decline of Pleasure.

There are several places where Podhoretz sees taste as contributing a sense of self and self worth.

It may be true that there is no disputing tastes, but it is also true that differences of opinion over taste are very often the source of bitter hatreds. As a critic, editor, and writer I have continually been struck by the sheer violence of response a strongly expressed judgment, especially a negative one, of a novel or play almost always provokes: you would think that an issue of life and death was at stake in the decision to like or dislike a particular book. But that, it seems, is how many people feel threatened in their very being when a critic challenges their tastes, and wildly grateful, as though it were a sign of Calvinist grace, to be confirmed and justified.

And this sense of self-worth is easier to achieve when the value judgments become clearer by being moved out of the realm of aesthetics into that of politics:

Scholars have told us that the vogue of sentimentality in the eighteenth-century English novel was the creature of a debased and secularized Calvinism, the idea having arisen that the capacity to shed tears over the contemplation of certain situations was the “fruit” of “right” feeling within and therefore a sign that one was not among the damned – in securlarized terms, the hard of heart – but among the elect – in secularized terms, the spiritually refined. (Oscar Wilde’s great quip, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh aloud at the death of Little Nell,” acquires an added dimension, as though it needed one, from this bit of cultural history.) It may well be that something of the same process was at work in establishing the curious tyranny that taste came at some point to exercise over the soul of educated Americans, leaving them with the uneasy conviction that by the fruits of their aesthetic sensibilities would they be known as saved (superior) or damned (crude and philistine) – known, that is, as much to themselves as others.

But whatever the roots of this tyranny may be, it appears to grow stronger in a politically quiescent period like the fifties, when taste tends to become a substitute for politics as an area for the testing of virtue, and to decline somewhat in a period like the sixties, when it is replaced by the need to show sufficient concern for the plight of Negroes and to express the proper degree of outrage over the war in Vietnam (both of which invariably seem to entail being in favor of books sharing the same political point of view: an easier and much less anxiety-making property to perceive than whether a book is good literature.) Thus any critic of talent who devoted himself in the fifties to writing about ambitious current novels could expect to be read with far more attention and discussed with far more intensity than he would ten years later.

He also contributes this, on the need for great artists to exist during any given period:

”I will never be an orphan on the earth as long as this man lives on it,” said Gorky of Tolstoy, giving the most beautiful expression I have ever encountered to the exaltation and vicarious vindication men always seem to feel at the mere knowledge that greatness is possible in the time and place of their own inglorious passage from birth to death. The insistent craving for this knowledge, I believe lies behind many an inflated literary (and political) reputation. It is the most important single factor in the persistent reappearance of the illusion that the serious critic has to go on puncturing in a period like the fifties when the work being done is mainly a work of consolidation.

This may explain the need critics and readers often feel to identify "the greatest living novelist" or some such superlative - an assertion that greatness has not passed from the earth.

The question of the formation of taste, however, doesn’t arise. Podhoretz talks about Mrs K’s tutoring in social behavior, but says nothing about which writers, if any, she brought to his attention as worthy. He seems to have already been an avid reader at the time she first encounters him – the source of his promise in her eyes – but he never says how he managed to fall into reading in the first place, as it doesn’t seem to have come from either his parents or his peers. Nor does he say how he came to a taste for those poets he did read; Keats is mentioned several times, but nothing about the appeal his poems held for the teenager. Like other names dropped into the narrative, Mozart and Cezanne, for example, they are the things Podhoretz has “a taste for” as if that were self-explanatory. Unlike his rebellion in the realm of manners, he never mentions pushing back against the art that Mrs K advocated.

One lesson he does seem to have taken from Mrs K, and one he apparently only came to understand over time, is that taste is inextricably linked with social position:

And how could she have explained to me that there was no socially neutral ground in the United States of America, and that a distaste for the surroundings in which I was bred, and ultimately (God forgive me) even for many of the people I loved, and a new taste for other kinds of people – how could she have explained that all this was inexorably entailed in the logic of a taste for the poetry of Keats and the painting of Cezanne and the music of Mozart?

In becoming a literary critic, the author sets himself up as a tastemaker (though he never uses that term) and, as the quotes above indicate, an implied judge of other people’s tastes, a task, one presumes his university degrees have qualified him to undertake. Stated thus baldly, this proposition hardly seems likely to find many supporters in the present age. The popular cliché has it, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for his life time.” The model for tastemakers would seem to be that the university degrees teach the critic to “fish”, that is to recognize literary quality, and he then feeds his fish, books of worth, to the reading public.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Podhoretz is a thoroughly detestable character, and is now a major warmonger.

For all his faults, he's pretty candid in this account of his rise from the tenements of Brooklyn to the self-important but petty fiefdom of the "New York intellectuals." It's a good read if you can bring yourself to care about these self-important and unpleasant people

NoPod's rather untalented son is nevertheless his heir.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir by the former editor of Commentary magazine who started out as a literary critic. The backstory is Podhoretz’s description of his conversion by Columbia University from a lower class Brooklyn Jew to a New York left wing intellectual is a story that reflects on current events on the Columbia campus. Podhoretz and many other Jewish Americans left the Democratic Party to become neoconservatives, a trend that continues today with the antisemitism and anti-Zionism towards Israel’s defense of their country against Muslim terrorists.

[Thom Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest work about the New York literati. Chummy, gossippy, worthwhile as a cultural document. You might call it The Real Henry Beck's Evil Twin.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of arrogance and bombast, it's not hard to see why Norman Podhoretz's social calendar had a lot more blank spaces when this memoir was released in late 1967.

Written while Podhoretz was well on his way to becoming the neoconservative that we think of him today as being, Making It traces his route from the rough and tumble Brooklyn neighborhood of his depression-era childhood, up until he lands the Editor in Chief position at Commentary Magazine.

I would argue that the book works better today as a fascinating piece of Jewish American sociology and intellectual history than it probably did upon publication. The narrative deals with the struggles Podhoretz faced as a Jew trying to assimilate into the culture at large, a concern that was quite substantial for someone born in 1930. A second theme that Podhoretz is extremely concerned with is the relationship between the cultured intellectual and the idea of success. He believes that this is the "dirty little secret" that every wtiter harbours; that is, the desire to obtain power, either through publication or fame. Even today, this is something worth considering. Making It might not be a particularly likeable book, but it is a very good book.

[Daniel Kalish]

"...SUCCESS," as William James put it in a famous remark, "is our national disease"; on the other hand, a contempt for success is the consensus of the national literature for the past hundred years and more. On the one hand, our culture teaches us to shape our lives in accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction."

"There were other things in the world to do: no one, it had seemed, had ever told me this before; all anyone had ever told me, it seemed, was that there was almost nothing in the world worth doing. It didn't matter that I had no conception for the moment of what these other things, these other careers, to which she had referred might be; it was enough to be shocked for the first time since adolescence into the realization that the narrowness of the alternatives before me was a reflection not of reality but of the timidity of my imagination, the scantiness of my own experience, and the lingering effects of a childhood among the poor."

Podhoretz exposes the "dirty little secret" of the New York literary world of the 50s and 60s, namely the true desire for money, fame, and power, in this sometimes shocking, admittedly snobbish, and always candid autobiography. Come for the honest expose, stay for the off-hand insightful notes on writing, being a writer, and other aspects of life.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of unbelievable that this ever went out of print (and for so long). Essential for a few reasons: 1.) A gossipy history of a tumultuous time in the history of the small literary and political magazines coming out of New York from the 30s to the 60s, 2.) A frank defense of striving for success against the popular "aw shucks" pretense that ambition is a sign of corruption, 3.) The author, the one-time figurehead of one of the central bastions of intellectual Zionism in America, is here just a non-Zionist who is ambivalent about his own Jewish identity and actually a bit of a liberal, and 4.) He has the polar opposite take on the intellectual (and their purpose/function in society) from Sartre's "A Plea for Intellectuals" (he even mentions his distance from Sartre early on).

Pretty juicy and stimulating and some great passages about power in the workplace as well as writing, blockage, and editing. Would like to read the original introduction for this edition that Podhoretz insisted be removed. Anyway, I wish I hadn't put this one off for so long. Really enjoyed myself even if he totally sucks now.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book. The intellectual history of the period between Cambridge and his service, is remarkable and leaves a reader wanting more. His juxtaposition of himself and Bellow or Bellow's Augie March is intentionally or unintentionally striking, and I say this as someone who reveres Bellow and esteems Podhoretz. His account of his own ascension is intriguing, if harder to relate to at present. but the picayune struggles of the literary magazines, the editorial squabbles, were far less engaging. Parts aged quite well, parts did not.

[James Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came for the bravado and gossip; stayed for the editorial apprenticeship.

[Elliot Kaufman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sorry, but I found him likeable.

[Steve Gross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Podhoretz's writing is never easy. About 1/3 wisdom, 1/3 biography and 1/3 somewhat airy philosophizing. People who want to write should read this.

[Chris Beach · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I stumbled on this man through an article he wrote for The Free Press . I find it ironic that the end of the age of the intellectual is upon us . They have finally destroyed themselves . We have gone from this wonderful literate man and his absolutely beautiful writing to harvard university hiring a drag queen by the name of LaWhore Vagistan as a visiting professor. He /She will teach a course in the spring semester of 2026 . What he/she will teach I do not know. However I do know that it signifies the death of the rigorous and serious academic institution. The timing is perfect because Artificial Intelligence will prove far superior to this nonsense.
Of course in addition to the hiring of the drag queen there is renewed Anti Semitism running rampant on college campuses.
But I digress ; enjoy every word of this book . Mr. Podhoretz’s writing is pure poetry. It is soothing to the soul. God bless the great man.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating (if a bit smug and very self-important) view into the mind of a significant but singularly unpleasant man, Norman Podhoretz takes the reader on a journey through the first thirty-seven or so years of his life, from Brooklyn to the petty fiefdom at Commentary magazine he would rule with an iron fist for thirty-five years. Making It isn't a terrible read- when he dialed back the reactionary smugness Podhoretz was not a bad writer by any means, but it's singularly inessential for those not interested in a window into a now-long vanished world of predominately jewish New York intellectuals, or insight into the developing mind of one of the fathers of neoconservatism.

[Stuart Berman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful autobiography that gives us insight into an exclusive society of literary pioneers in the mid 20th century. Norman Podhoretz has to be admired for being both honest and public about his journey from Marxist to neocon.

For those interested in the ideological aspects, I would recommend pairing this book with David Brook’s Social Animal and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty. These three books give much deeper insight into what drives us into our positions as well as the price one may pay for changing those positions.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure what to say

At times this book flows, at times it is like slogging through cement. Too many names that mean nothing to me help to make it a tough read at times. Autobiographical at times, introspective at times, but also a discussion of the literary circles, the money circles, the Jewish circles, the non-Jewish circles of the 50’s and 60’s. I am glad I read it, not sure I could, or should, read it again.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alternate title: "A Different Kind Of Self Awareness"

One reason I looked into this, to be honest, is because I'm fascinated by the Twitter feed of Norman's son, John Podhoretz, to whom Norman gifted the editorship of "Commentary," one of the neater nepo tricks of our time. JP is the Angriest Israel Cheerleader on Twitter, and it's kind of astonishing. Anyway, no real explanation here, except in deep subtext. But pretty entertaining.

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this during my brief conservative phase. I was reading Commentary and admired Podhoretz after reading some of his essays. The book did not let me down. He recalls his journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan, which he calls one of the longest, most arduous journeys anyone can make. He is speaking metaphorically about upward mobility, of course, and his journey was a very interesting one.

[William Laing]

This is a bit detailed in places and while most of the eminent persons the young Norman Pod encountered are still well known, some of them aren't and a few notes would improve the book on that point.
Mid twentieth century political-intellectual life in New York still is interesting, and has lessons.
Purely as autobiography, quite thought-provoking.

[Adam Dayan · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely fun - where else can one get penetrating analysis of the American class system, anecdotes about every mid-century New York intellectual who mattered and hebrew ejaculation jokes in one book?

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

But enough about you. Let’s hear about Norman! Same story as Oscar Wilde’s “Remarkable Rocket” except true.

[Ruby B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful bildungsroman a la Balzac's Lost Illusions, filled with bold insights on the workings of certain social spheres, and the realities of class in America.

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pugnacious account of the author's intellectual progress from rags to critical riches. There is something here to offend every reader, whether his contentious political affiliation or his intemperate pronouncements on his former colleagues and friends. From this side of the Atlantic, his assault on the academy makes a stimulating read, but I don't have to suffer the political and social consequences of divisive rhetoric, and Brutus was an honourable man...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all the people who posted that Rorty quote from "Achieving Our Country" on your social media feeds in 2016: go actually read Rorty if you haven't, then go read this. Podhoretz mostly unintentionally reveals the vulnerabilities of the New Deal Left that let to its total implosion in 1968, just a year after this book came out. He's generally supportive of anti-communism, but not McCarthyism. He agrees with protestors that Vietnam is not a good idea, but hates their methods and their anti-Americanism, especially if it results in praising the Vietcong. He uses his ex-girlfriends as plot devices and his wife as a vehicle for explaining his money troubles after having four kids and moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but admires Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy, if only as bomb-throwers in the downtown scene (he calls them "Dark Women"). And finally he's unbelievably clueless about racism: he recognizes that American society is deeply implicated in the structures of racism and shit-talks Baldwin for shopping "The Fire Next Time" to the New Yorker rather than to Commentary, but his best advice after riots in Harlem is to tear down the neighborhood and rebuild it with better housing and social services.
But at the same time, he is (in all his SWM-ness) an example of the way that class walls were climbable in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. He's observant about the varieties of class, and feels more solidarity with the Southern good old boys in the army after he's drafted than he did with his Cambridge peers when he was on a Fulbright. He knows that the other downtown literati talk shit about him because he's Jewish and grew up poor, but he outsmarts and outworks them and shoves it in their faces.
When this guy is told that everything he did happened because the U.S. was still built on systemic sexism and racism, he's not going to react well! That's not to excuse Podhoretz's turn to the right along with many other white dudes in the 1970s, and the takeover of the patrician Republican party by the Nixonites and Reaganites and various anti-intellectuals who, duh, dominate it today. But we have to recognize that our meritocratic ideal does not sit well next to efforts to ameliorate past wrongs in our history. Maybe we should get rid of the meritocratic part, and then little Podhoretz could grow up in a country that doesn't idolize success and wealth and merit and instead values...compassion, empathy, localism? Because if we try to keep the meritocratic part and just kick out the hard-working white dudes who make good, they are always going to burn you.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this 1967 memoir Podhoretz is remarkably honest about own high self-regard and his quest for fame as a literary critic.

Having grown up in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, he wins a scholarship to Columbia. From there he is transported into a higher-status milieu, ultimately ending up in a circle of influential intellectual types in Manhattan -- writers, magazine editors, and social theorists.

The book is at its best when Podhoretz charts his rise, applying an anthropological lens to American culture -- considering assimilation to W.A.S.P. taste and manners as the cost of inclusion, understanding power structures in literary circles as well as in the military, and comparing the British upper class to its American counterpart.

Things go downhill when he starts to make a name for himself in the literary world of 1950s New York. Early on he finds a formula -- writing opinions that are unpopular in his leftist crowd, because controversy keeps his name in the press. People first view him as a wunderkind, then they get a little tired of him. He craves their attention, so he keeps throwing bombs. He believes he is taking a stand against hypocrisy, and that the haters are just envious of his talent. He loses any sense of idealism and just wants to win.

He finds that he loves to wield power and hobnob poolside with the rich and famous. So he decides to more relentlessly pursue worldly success. The problem is that he tries to frame his path as heroic, when in fact he comes across as a small and somewhat bitter person, engaged in quaint disputes and solipsistic trains of thought. He intends the memoir as a vindication -- proof of his superiority! -- but in the end it's just a portrait of a petty character.

(In the decades after this memoir came out, Podhoretz became an influential right-winger and is a now a Trump supporter.)

The book was, in a perverse way, entertaining to read -- the memoirs of a real-life Becky Sharpe. But I felt that I was coming face-to-face with a poisonous individual. I'm glad I could close the book and stop living in his mind.

[Jill Blevins · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those books recommended by someone, somewhere, on some podcast because the author is such an asshole - bragging about his success when this book made him a laughingstock and ultimately unsuccessful.

I like the way the language is so 1960’s but it’s so man-like that I couldn’t read past the first chapter. Only because it’s so darned long. If you’re bored, go ahead and pick it up.

I tried again to get back to this fascinating book, especially with the new intro by Terry Teachout. But no, I could not. Not with the shouting and aggression and craziness happening in our country right now. Somehow this just wasn't the right book to read for me.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a look at success -- how to achieve it, and the ramifications of success -- by a Jewish literary critic. There are nuggets of wisdom in this work, and I think it does force one to consider issues such as fame, money, and life in an honest way. Still, the authors passion for power and his critical analysis of power and materialistic wealth turned me off. I think that this is a worthy read, especially for those interested in successful Jewish personalities, but not anything stunning or profound.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"When Making It was first published in 1967, it ripped through the airless parlor of American letters like a great belch. The man responsible, the literary critic Norman Podhoretz, sat smirking with relish at the revolting thing he'd just done."

–Tobi Haslett on the reissue of Norman Podhoretz's Making It in the April/May 2017 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, please go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/024_01/1...