My Love Affair with America
The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In this touching and delightful memoir, Norman Podhoretz charts the ups and downs of his lifelong love affair with his native land, and warns that to turn against America, from the Right no less than from the Left, is to fall into the rankest ingratitude. While telling the story of how he himself grew up to be a fervent patriot, one of this country's leading conservative thinkers urges his fellow conservatives to rediscover and reclaim their faith in America.
A superb storyteller, Podhoretz takes us from his childhood as a working-class kid in Brooklyn during the Great Depression -- the son of Jewish immigrants singing Catholic hymns in a public school staffed by Irish spinsters and duking it out on the streets with his black and Italian classmates -- to his later education, his shifting political alliances, and his arrival at a happy personal and intellectual resolution.
My Love Affair with America shows us a gentler and funnier Podhoretz than readers have seen before. At the same time, it presents a picture of someone eager to proclaim, against all comers, that America represents one of the high points in the history of human civilizations. In this powerful, elegantly written, and poignant cautionary tale, Podhoretz pleads with his fellow conservatives not to fall, as some have lately done, into their own special brand of anti-Americanism, as he reminds them of the disastrous consequences that followed the assault by the New Left against the United States in decades gone by.
Warm in feeling and brilliantly perceptive, My Love Affair with America points the way back to a thoroughly unabashed love of country -- the kind of patriotism that has rarely been encountered in recent years and that is as invigorating as it is inspiring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patriotism comes easily to Podhoretz, the influential conservative thinker who, during a 35-year stint as editor of Commentary, steered the magazine from unabashed Left/liberalism firmly to the Right. Now a septuagenarian, this once-hotheaded utopian looks back, with an engaging lucidity and a crisp style, at his remarkable life, which he began as the Yiddish-speaking child of a Brooklyn milkman and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Galicia in Eastern Europe. Having cut his political teeth in the leftist Popular Front (he winces recalling the blank-verse ode he once wrote to the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad), Podhoretz reports the exhilaration he felt at defending McCarthy-era America against his communist colleagues while on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge. The first blush of love for his country then developed into a passionate affair, which he fleshes out in this meandering volume. He recalls colleagues such as Saul Bellow, Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer; dissects the politics of anti-Vietnam radicals; and unflinchingly evaluates his own responsibility for the spread of what he calls a "morbid and dangerous" hatred of America on both the Left and Right. Still loudly and proudly defending the nation against Marxists, Gore Vidal and the ACLU, Podhoretz retains his self-described ability to make pro-American arguments that have his opponents frothing at the mouth. Whatever the reader's political outlook, this book is a valuable record of one of the most vital periods in America's postwar coming-of-age.
