SOURCE: Rollyson, Carl. “After the Fall.” New Criterion 17, no. 7 (March 1999): 62-5.

In the following review, Rollyson commends Podhoretz's provoking remembrances in Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer and highlights how “The Family” influenced the cultural and political scene of the late twentieth century.

Ex-Friends is volume three, so to speak, of Norman Podhoretz's voyage through and out of the world of the New York intellectuals—or “the Family,” as he prefers to call them. Podhoretz did not realize that he was on the road to apostasy when his 1968 memoir, Making It, fomented so much controversy. What caused so much fuss? Well, the book revealed a young man's ambition, his lust for power, his straining ego—the stuff of novels, not of a serious intellectual who should be concerned not with his position but with principles and ideas...