My Love Affair With America

In nearly forty years on the American literary scene, Norman Podhoretz has established himself as one of our most perceptive social critics. Now, in this moving and witty memoir, he shows another side-as a natural born storyteller with a sure sense of character and anecdote and the ability to construct a compelling personal narrative that opens a window onto an exemplary American life.

Podhoretz brilliantly recreates his experience growing up in a Jewish immigrant family in a working class neighborhood of Brooklyn during the Depression. He sang Catholic hymns in a public school run by Irish spinsters and played and fought with black and Italian classmates after school let out. After serving in the army in Occupied Germany, he stepped into the world of ideas at Columbia University and began to acquire the friends and enemies that made him one of this country’s best known controversialists.

My Love Affair with America succeeds brilliantly as autobiography. But it is more than the poignant recovery of lost time. Podhoretz uses his own experience to launch a strong defense of America and American values at a time when he fears that his fellow conservatives are in danger of following the path of the New Left into contempt for their native land. The gratitude Podhoretz feels for the United States is a challenge to the political Right as well as the Left. The love he feels is beyond ideology.

In this unique book and in his own unique way, Norman Podhoretz makes the personal political.