Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby
(Henry Holt)
April 8, 2025
WRITING ABOUT reading has long been a passion for this former New Yorker film critic, reflected in his 1996 bestseller Great Books, which chronicled his middle-aged engagement with the Western canon through courses at Columbia University. Subsequently, he got attention for American Sucker — a memoir about losing big on the stock market — and a polemic about the prevalence of Snark. Now that he’s into his eighties, a lifetime of thoughts on the impact of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer are synthesized into a volume about how music, film, feminism, and literature were influenced by a common heritage. Marc Weisblott
