‘The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center’
By Marty Peretz
Post Hill Press, Wicked Son Books, 336 pages

Marty Peretz’s “The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center” is a memoir that doubles as a Grand Tour of American intellectual and political life in the second half of the 20th century and the first fifth of the 21st. Now in his ninth decade, Mr. Peretz has made fierce friends and implacable enemies. That has led to a book crackling with personality and not lacking in ego. It is also, though, an elegy for a world of ideas even the mighty Mr. Peretz could not sustain.