This is the best book that every OB sonographer should have at their desk. All the information is summarized concisely. The images are very good also.

This book is particularly useful to residents in ObGyn. Excellent for review and presentations.

I read this book because I had heard the name "Norman Podhoretz" bruited about in the odd book review here and there. He is, or at any rate was, the editor of a journal called "Commentary", which I have only ever heard of in the context of the Woody Allen joke: "I heard that 'Commentary' and 'Dissent' have merged, and now they're called 'Dysentery'". It seems that the author once knew some people who are now way more famous than him, and he wants to tell us all about how he believes they went wrong.

It is not easy for a non-American reader to care more than two shakes of a lamb's tail about what this apparently well-known person thinks. He starts the book with what he obviously regards as a priceless witticism ("If I want to drop names, I just list my ex-friends"). If I had fallen out with the likes of Lillian Hellmann, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, I would be inclined to think that there was something wrong with me, but... He goes on to quote some not-terribly-interesting gossip about various writers, and seems to feel that he has said something extraordinarily important and significant by doing so. Who is this guy? What, exactly, is the sum total of his contribution to human joyfulness? I've never heard of him, outside the context of the odd book review (of somebody else's work), and I still don't understand why a presumably solvent publisher sees fit to print his dull grumbling about people who are obviously more talented than him.

What is this book for? I am as much a fan of literary chat as the next person, but this book is almost entirely about the private whinges of somebody I've never heard of. It doesn't tell me anything about American cultural life, except that the author is not interested in the subject. He's not even funny. Can somebody explain how this thing got published?

The book is interesting in that it deals with famous members of mid-century intelligencia, but it also explores the nuances of political thought happening among members of the left in that time period. Also interesting is the fact that Podhoretz had his falling out with people sometimes for reasons other than his right-wing conversion in the 1970s and 1980s.

The book is quite good at explaining the subtle differences in opinion among left-wing American intellectuals of the time. Almost everyone had trifled with Communism or fellow travelerism, but out of that start grew many different points of view that Norman and his Ex-Friends would argue about again and again. Being philosophical writers, they would tend to explore many different avenues from one another. It's a wonder that any two writers remain life-long friends.

I grew less interested in these characters as the book progressed though. The pattern gave me the "heard it once, heard it a thousand times" feeling. By Hannah Arendt, I was tired from a long journey. But not because Mr. Podhoretz isn't a fine writer, he most certainly is. Only, I'll be ready for another subject matter from him next time around.

Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends is a fascinating look into the Culture Wars that have rumbled across our intellectual landscape for the past 50 or 60 years. Podhoretz has been in the trenches throughout, though his alliances changed radically as he came to see, with more and more acuity, the destructiveness of leftist thought. He reveals a great deal about the characters he called friends--and then ex-friends--as he made his own journey from the left to the right. "Rigid ideologue" he may be, but only someone reading this book with the "left side" of his brain would claim that the subjects of his study are enlightened and tolerant. How else to explain the vitriolic attacks on Podhoretz for having honest questions about the motives and tactics of the liberal establishment? Is Norman Podhoretz a "paranoid little bigot" as one (no doubt open minded) reviewer claims? Only if love of country and the desire to see true democracy flourish are malignant ideas. As it stands, Ex-Friends is a brilliant expose of the lunacy of the left, an often thinly veiled totalitarianism passing itself off as progressivism. (The chapters on Ginsberg and Mailer are sufficient to illustrate this point.) Podhoretz's contribution to this discussion is invaluable, and only a recalcitrant liberal would call it "amusing garbage." I only hope, Mr. Podhoretz, that there is more where this came from.