When I was a kid my father told me that there were two things never to discuss with friends: religion and politics. He told me that not only could you run the risk of terribly insulting someone, but you'd also never succeed in changing anyone's mind anyhow. These simple rules for stress-free friendships never fell on the ears of Norman Podhoretz, who has just decided to cash in on his life's ideological squabblings in a new memoir absurdly entitled Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. The one with-it thing you can say about the proudly prudent Podhoretz is that he knows his name alone would fail to move many books off the shelf.

For the 99 percent of the population who's never heard of him (those so blissfully living the unexamined life as Podhoretz via Socrates puts it), Norman Podhoretz is one of the last remaining old school men of letters, the former editor-in-chief of Commentary, and leader of the neoconservative movement. Before he was a neoconservative, though, he was a member of a group known only as The Family, left-wing Jewish New York intellectuals who met in Upper West Side versions of Parisian salons and were the only people on earth who could tell you the difference between a Communist and an anti-anti-Communist. These were the folk who did what they could to bring Trotskyite ideals to mainstream American thought and helped validate some of the radicalism of the 60s New Left. It must also have been the only time Podhoretz had been among worthy thinkers, as now, 35+ years later and chin-deep in the cold right wing, it is still the only thing Podhoretz has about him worth writing about.

The book's five main chapters introduce how and under what ideological circumstances Podhoretz met the heavy-hitting names he splashes on his front cover to sell his book. There is a loving first act; two kindred minds meeting and forming a tight, personal bond (with the exception of Ginsberg, whose drug use, homosexuality and naughty tongue prevented even the young freewheelin' Podhoretz from growing close to him.) Then, something drastic will happen in the political climate: Stalin's death, Brown vs. Board of Ed., Eichmann's trial, etc. Sure enough, one of these events will cause a schism within the family. Factions will branch apart, sects will close ranks, and Norman Podhoretz will mark an additional notch under "ex-friend".

And . . . with these folks . . . ex-friends aren't just people you ignore if you bump into them at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. Ex-friends are people you spend the bulk of your time (heck, it's your job) denouncing in the intellectual press of Commentary, The Partisan Review, Dissent, and, if it's dishy enough, The New Yorker.

Midway through the book I realized why The Family could never take my father's advice. Ranting discussions about Politics and Ideology were all these people had. We admire these people in college, but when we examine the seamier sides of their lives in books like these, they (including the author) are exposed as gloomy, miserable people, abnormally sensitive to issues sane men and women are able to keep as relevant, but not overpowering. Even the loving Lionel Trilling, to whom Podhoretz was a surrogate son, took Podhoretz's difference of opinion as a personal affront not only to him as his former professor, but as an insult to his former professor, whom Podhoretz supposedly admired, but was now surely shaming from beyond the grave. And it wasn't just rhetoric. I'm talking real anger and depression. See what I mean?

Also, it seems, these strange folk would create their own difficulties by going out of their way to teeter on the edge of their own party line. The best example of this is Hannah Arendt's essay about Eichmann. She made her name by blasting Stalinism, equating its totalitarianism with Nazism, despite being an anti-Zionist democratic-socialist Jew. In her intense efforts to stay true to all these loyalties, and also extract her own unique insight from political situations, she came to the convoluted decision that Eichmann's life should be granted release. It was a twisty-turny argument that had an inherent logic (too detailed to even paraphrase), but one that evaporated the minute one took one's eyes from the page. Most of The Family, who, if they could agree on nothing else, agreed that Nazis were bad, jumped on her hard. The thing is, any one of them could've done it. Competition for attention was great, so one really had to have a bold statement to make if one wanted center stage. And if someone other than Hannah had done it, she'd've denounced them, too.

But everything Podhoretz writes is colored by his current hawkish right wing perspective. Which makes the book as a whole ridiculous, because different fights he's had with different ex-friends come when Norman sides on varying points on the political map. His beef with Ginsberg came down to his demand for decency in literature, surely a right wing stance. Yet later in the book, he butts heads with the Trillings for not standing up to McCarthyism (Joe, not Gene), surely a left wing stance. The fact that Podhoretz can write fondly about his past arguments that currently conflict with his old points of view (he became one of the hardest of hardline anti-Communists in later years, and a pal of the Reagan administration) shows how thin a man Podhoretz truly is.

However, despite the arch-conservative slant Podhoretz currently writes with, the book does have much merit. It is extremely well-written, and evokes all those black-tie affairs, Columbia University rallies, and summers in Westport with clarity. It is also amusing to read about the bickering between like-minded groups that today have lost most of their relevence, the best having to do with the aforementioned Communists vs. anti-anti Communists. And the cast of characters is greater than is indicated by the title. Anecdotes involving Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Leonard Bernstein, S.J. Perelman, Henry Wallace, Saul Bellow, Whittaker Chambers, Martin Heidegger(!), and William F. Buckley can't help but make one misty over a time gone by. The best Paul Harvey-esque moment comes when Lillian Hellman (not yet an ex-friend) stops by unannounced with William Wyler while Norman is having cocktails with a young, Milquetoast professor. After Hellman and Wyler leave, the wide-eyed professor asks of Podhoretz, "Is this what New York is always like?"

And that young professor so enthralled by celebrity grew up to become . . . Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

This book is a People Magazine article for highbrows. Change the names Lionel and Diana Trilling to Brad Pitt and Jenifer Aniston, and the arguments from branches of socialism to designer suitmakers and you've got a major best-seller.