Buckley
The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend
“A rich, immersive biography exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through the life of the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Financial Times, Telegraph (UK), Christian Science Monitor, Air Mail, Prospect Magazine
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
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., seized the public stage—and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative 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, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive 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, the twentieth century’s most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York.
Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley’s secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq—even as his own media empire was unraveling.
At a crucial moment in American history, Buckley offers a gripping and powerfully relevant story about the birth of modern politics and those who shaped it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The conservative activist William F. Buckley helped make the American right a respectable rival to liberalism in part by making peace with liberal doctrine, according to this searching biography. Journalist Tanenhaus (The Death of Conservatism) recaps Buckley's career as founder of the National Review, host of the talk show Firing Line, author of splashy cultural critiques, and Republican Party kingmaker. Tanenhaus's Buckley is a charming and good-humored man; a sharp debater and facile writer, though a shallow and often factually challenged thinker; and a loyal friend but a bad judge of character. (He once helped free a National Review reader jailed for murder who went on to attempt murder again.) A scion of oil wealth, Buckley built bridges between plutocratic conservatism and the populist New Right, a fusion that helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency. In Tanenhaus's telling, Buckley embodies a gradual, grudging conservative accommodation with liberal fundamentals, moving from pre-WWII isolationism to support for anti-communist interventionism, from genteel apologias for Jim Crow to an acceptance of the civil rights revolution, and from denunciations of big government to tacit acknowledgment that big government was here to stay. Tanenhaus is clear-eyed about Buckley's many failures but also does justice to his eccentric charisma, humanity, and wit. This elegant, capacious character study shows how Buckley's spadework opened many of the fault lines that still fracture American politics.
