Variety has posted a review of Jeff Zimbalist’s How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer by Owen Gleiberman:
Forget what Mailer could or could not get away with today. He was feeding the fire of controversy and provocation 50 and 60 years ago; even then, he was considered a figure of singular outrage. Yet it was all part of his mission to make a difference in his time, to wake us all up — to what was happening in society (not just the busy surface but beneath it), to how the government and the corporation were working in cahoots to perfect a new brand of authoritarianism (something he was explicitly onto in — yes — 1948), to the secrets and mysteries we were living inside. When Diana Trilling, the venerable lioness of a literary critic, declared Mailer to be “the most important writer of our time,” she wasn’t kidding around.
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