Reading this account of David Brock’s journey from the “bigoted” right to a left-liberal politics that allows him to embrace his homosexuality was no kind of pleasure. Luminous observations in the book are few and far between, while betwixt them are ponderous revelations pertaining to David’s sexual awakening, his relations with a “blond blue-eyed dreamboat of the Brad Pitt variety,” and those (mostly tortured, except perhaps in the case of liberal Democratic scandalmonger Sidney Blumenthal, whom Brock profoundly but inexplicably respects) involving other acquaintances. By the end of his confessions, the only people who appear likable are David’s parents—decent ethnic Catholics who made the mistake of adopting him and subsequently puzzled over whom or what they had reared.
The “right” that blinded Brock was in fact exclusively neoconservative. His eyesight started to fail with the onset of his sympathy for Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been prevented by student activists from speaking at Berkeley during Brock’s student days there, and with his discovery of the “intellectual vigor and fiery polemics” in Commentary (contrasting with the “foppish Anglophile bent of National Review and American Spectator”). Brock’s connection to Laura Ingraham, a wannabe neocon TV personality who had been Dinesh...