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Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
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About This Book
More than two decades in the making, the definitive biography of William F. Buckley Jr. tells the story of America's greatest conservative and the rise and fall of the movement he led.In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. instantly seized the public stage—and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence. Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews, entrée to his intimate circle, and unrestricted access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution. Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases—founding editor of National Review, syndicated columnist and TV debater, ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, mentor to Ronald Reagan, wisecracking candidate for mayor of New York, bestselling novelist and memoirist, jet-setting clubman and socialite, downhill skier and sailboat racer.Tanenhaus also explores the private and darker life of Bill secret CIA missions, complicated friendships with other prominent figures, including Richard Nixon and Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and late in life, Buckley's lonely struggle to hold together a movement coming apart over AIDS, the culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq.Majestic in its sweep, lushly detailed, rich in ideas and argument, packed with news and revelations, Buckley is the authoritative account of an American giant and the world he made.
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Reviews
"Tanenhaus has left us with a fair and balanced story of a life of purpose, one that was actively lived and whose echoes are still felt today."
"Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts."
"Tanenhaus is fair to this complicated pundit — more than fair — and the payoff is worth it."
"Painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted, Buckley is a capacious and incisive history of the modern conservative movement's formative years, seen through the eyes of its intellectual leader — a man who, in Tanenhaus's hands, is enthralling and infuriating by turns, but never boring ..."
"Buckley is a magnificent work of history as well as of biography, and is as relevant to these parlous times as it is revelatory of Buckley and his times ..."
"An enjoyable and fascinating romp through American political and cultural life in much of the 20th century."
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