SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “The Good Fight.” National Review 38, no. 12 (4 July 1986): 36-7.

In the following review, Hart compliments Podhoretz's acumen in identifying subversive trends in the literary world in The Bloody Crossroads, lauding Podhoretz's arguments as sound and reasonable.

Norman Podhoretz studied at Columbia with Lionel Trilling, then won a fellowship to Cambridge and worked with F. R. Leavis. Both of these modern masters are present in this book, at once as explicit subject—the title itself comes from Trilling—and as critical example. Trilling was a superb cultural critic, specifically of the liberal culture of his time, to which he had a peculiar relationship of loyalty and loathing. Leavis was at his best in dealing directly with a literary text.

Podhoretz does both things splendidly [in The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet]. After abandoning literary criticism for many years, he here returns to it, and he...