SOURCE: Poirier, Richard. “Big Pod.” London Review of Books 21, no. 17 (2 September 1999): 19-23.

In the following review, Poirier asserts that, although Podhoretz's personal anecdotes are enjoyable and finely narrated, Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer occasionally becomes side-tracked by tangents involving political diatribes and old grudges.

This book is ostensibly about six literary figures with whom Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor-in-chief of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. It was in the early years of this same period, the first five years of the Sixties, that what was often called the Family, a closely allied group of mostly New York intellectuals who published largely in Partisan Review and Commentary, came to prominence in the United States and when...