SOURCE: Buckley, Jr., William F. “Counting Ex-Friends.” National Review 51, no. 4 (8 March 1999): 58-9.

In the following review, Buckley—the founder of the National Review—extols Podhoretz's narrative skills and comments that the readers of Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer are privy to invaluable insights of the political and intellectual elite during the 1950s and 1960s.

The title of the new book by Norman Podhoretz stops you dead. You wish, fleetingly, that you had written a book with that zingy title: Ex-Friends. Well, maybe not—maybe we'd prefer just to forget ex-friends. Podhoretz is a serious man engaged in serious pursuits, and along the way in a full career as editor and author he concluded that a continuing friendship with these folks, on the old basis, wasn't any longer possible, or desirable. And he gives us the names...