SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “Making It Home.” Kenyon Review 30, no. 119 (February 1968): 282-88.

In the following excerpt, Weales expresses his disbelief regarding the numerous personal “hardships” Podhoretz describes in Making It, noting that the memoir portrays Podhoretz as a paranoid martyr figure.

A first section of Willie Morris' North toward Home appeared in Commentary (August 1966) and a generous slice of Norman Podhoretz's Making It in Harper's (December 1967). I am not suggesting a conspiracy, a you-print-me-and-I'll-print-you agreement (even though Mrs. Podhoretz is one of Morris' editors at Harper's). I am offering this publication information simply as an illustration of how closely connected the two authors and the two books are—a connection that is finally more apparent than, real, for it is difficult to imagine two more dissimilar books on the same subject. Both are success stories, autobiographies of a kind, accounts of how the author made his way from the...