Description
Book SynopsisAn illuminating biography of an American intellectual and one of the century's most important public thinkers whose commitment to social reform was balanced by his love of fiction, poetry, baseball, and music.
Trade ReviewGerald Sorin has written a lively and compelling biography of Irving Howe. A New York intellectual, Howe figured in most of the major and many of the minor debates of mid-twentieth-century America: socialism, modernism, Yiddish culture, civil rights, the new politics of postwar America, and the antiwar movement of the turbulent sixties. Howe spoke out forcefully and fearlessly, carving a place for intellectuals with moral vision. Sorins first biography deftly captures the complexity of the man and his eras. -- Deborah Dash Moore,author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.
Irving Howes career, with its constantly shifting strands of political activism, literary commentary, and accessible Jewish scholarship, makes a great subject for an intellectual biography. Painstakingly researched and fluently written, Gerald Sorins book strikes just the right balance between sympathetic identification and critical distance. Making excellent use of interviews, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Sorin recreates the many significant issues that engaged Howe. He brings considerable drama to Howes gradual break with Marxist sectarianism, his shifting perspectives on socialism, his momentous reconnection to Jewish culture, his battles with the New Left, and the literary controversies that accompanied his steady growth as a subtle reader and vigorous, penetrating critic. -- Morris Dickstein,author, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe's life and times * The Jewish Quarterly Review *
Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent offers such an intellectually detailed and conceptually animated account of Howes work. Sorin did an excellent job. * Magill's Literary Annual *
What Sorin has accomplished in this beautifully written, balanced and probing intellectual biography is the most complete picture we have of Howe, a portrait of how one Jewish intellectual and activist struggled daily to balance scholarship and politics and the life of the mind and a life of action. . . . Sorin has ably captured the life and passion of this most unusual man, whose commitment to democracy is a legacy still worth cherishing. * LA Times *
Table of Contents1 The Trauma of Sharply Fallen Circumstances: World of Our Fathers2 Illusions of Power and Coherence at CCNY: World of College Politics in the 1930s3 The Second World War and the Myopia of Socialist Sectarianism4 The Postwar World and the Reconquest of Jewishness5 Toward a "World More Attractive"6 The Origins of Dissent7 The Age of Conformity8 The Growth of Dissent and the Breakup of the Fifties9 More Breakups10 The Turmoil of Engagement: The Sixties: Part 111 Escalation and Polarization: The Sixties: Part 212 Retrospection and Celebration13 Sober Self-Re?ections: Democratic Radical, Literary Critic, Secular Jew
