Buckley

Praise

“Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley is a magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century. I couldn’t put it down, and was sorry when it ended. The same will be true of anyone interested in American politics. You cannot understand the rise of the conservative movement in modern America without understanding the life of William F. Buckley, Jr., and you cannot understand Buckley’s long and eventful life without reading Sam Tanenhaus’s deeply researched and profoundly insightful magnum opus.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend

“Sam Tanenhaus’s sparkling prose makes an already compelling subject irresistible. Not only a psychologically astute and subtle biography of a seminal figure, Buckley is now the definitive intellectual history of the conservative movement. William F. Buckley forever changed America, and Tanenhaus’s Buckley will forever change how we understand America.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

“Sam Tanenhaus has done more than produce an engrossing biography of one of the most significant political and journalistic figures of the second half of the twentieth century. He has illuminated the often ugly ideological origins of our present predicament.”—Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life

“A stone-cold masterpiece . . . Buckley is a brilliant portrait of man, movement, and age.”—Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party

“There are few figures in twentieth-century history more worthy of the birth-to-death treatment than William F. Buckley, the godfather of so much that is best and worst about today’s politics. And there is nobody better equipped to tell that story than Sam Tanenhaus, whose eloquence and incisive judgment make his book a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what the conservative movement once was and what it has come to be. Buckley is all that a biography could and should be: penetrating, deeply researched, respectful but critical.”—Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“Sam Tanenhaus’s masterly biography of William F. Buckley displays commanding knowledge, and deep understanding of a life and a family in all their quirky humanity—pulling off the high-wire act of documenting the Buckleys’ class privilege without reducing them to it. Writing with superb insight into celebrity culture, Tanenhaus nails Buckley for many lapses of judgment, while also revealing his countless acts of unpublicized generosity.”—Richard Wightman Fox, author of Lincoln’s Body