Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer w/David Denby

East End Books Ptown Presents: Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer w/Journalist & Film Critic David Denby 7/12 at 6pm.

David Denby is the New York Times bestselling author of Great Books. His other books include American Sucker and Lit Up. He was a film critic for New York magazine and The New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. His essays have appeared in The New Republic and The Atlantic. He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger.

Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.

They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.

As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.

Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous--larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.

"David Denby succeeds marvelously in Eminent Jews, his portrait of four icons who defined American culture in the second half of the 20th century. . . . Throughout, he makes a convincing case that his subjects exercised a 'moral strenuousness' that accounts for the longevity of their works and ideas. . . . A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Denby, an obviously talented raconteur, perfects the ironic erudition that has long characterized that magazine's style."
--Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Times Book Review

"With Eminent Jews, David Denby has written a fantastic book about four remarkably talented and consequential figures of American arts and letters. The book is as brilliant and witty as its subjects."
--Aaron Sorkin

"David Denby manages to capture his subjects in a remarkable way, all the while grounding them in their personal and public circumstance. By this feat he has enabled us, perhaps, to enjoy and understand them as they actually were."
--Bradley Cooper

"Denby is funny and spot-on. . . . He has written a book of dazzling verve, which captures as well as anyone ever has the matchless vigor of his four subjects."
--David Mikics, Tablet

"An exuberant, beautiful, wise celebration of American Jewish life in the twentieth century, and, let's use the word, eminent cultural history. His deeply psychological portraits of his four subjects will be regarded as the definitive ones."
--Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician

"A marvel. I cannot recall the last time I devoured a book as I did this one. . . . The writing is sensational: witty, persuasive, lyrical, passionate. The reader laughs, grimaces, tears up, is alternately delighted and disgusted, by the antics and sometimes unmet ambitions of these four oversized, manic Jews. . . . As a cultural history of postwar America, Eminent Jews stands alone."
--David Nasaw, author of Andrew Carnegie

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