#whatireadovershabbat Martin Peretz's The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center (Wicked Son, 2023)
The Controversialist has had an advertising campaign that would make many a contemporary author's mouth water. In this day and age of shoestring publishing budgets, its cover has lived on the back of magazines, and inside their pages, for months. I first heard about it from an ad in the Jewish Review of Books. As you learn about Peretz's financial successes, you begin to suspect that not just his publisher is behind the push. Certainly, as the title might suggest, he would like his side of a number of stories to be told. Or better yet, aired.
Luckily, wherever the push came from, The Controversialist is worth the read.
No life lived with conviction was ever conflict-free, and Peretz, a long-time Harvard educator, who for four decades ran D.C.’s premier journal of ideas, The New Republic, had his fair share of enemies. But this memoir of a life in the thick of things is primarily about the commitments and friendships that sustain you. A riveting guided tour of American politics, culture, Jewish life, and academia since the sixties, The Controversialist lays bare many hard truths about mainstream media and government, while delighting with stories of honest, loving, courageous people.
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