The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

This seems to be a period of stocktaking by neoconservatives, for Kramer's collection of essays and reviews comes on the heels of Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends. The two authors share many attitudes, having both evolved from radical leftists in their early years to vociferous critics of what they see as today's totalitarian dominance of American political and cultural thought by the left. But Podhoretz's book was freshly written and observed, while Kramer's is basically a collection of book reviews and essays, most of them written during the past dozen years. While Podhoretz is essentially retired, Kramer continues to enjoy a journalistic pulpit with his weekly pieces of art criticism in the New York Observer. He takes a lot of expected swipes here, usually employing as his base a biography of the subject under discussion: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kenneth Tynan. He blames Saul Bellow for not being sufficiently vigorous in responding to the PC attacks leveled against him, and has interesting observations on the permutations through which journals like Partisan Review and the New Republic have passed. There are thoughtful and revealing essays on two major art critics, Kramer's mentor Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, and on the mysterious Whittaker Chambers (whose now largely forgotten Witness Kramer describes as ""one of the best books ever written about the Communist experience in America""). Readers will find this to be a lively collection, whether or not they adhere to Kramer's stern view of recent intellectual history. (Apr.)