Buckley

At over a thousand pages, Tanenhaus's biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is less a life story than an attempt to write the origin history of modern American conservatism through one improbably central figure: the founder of National Review who moved fluidly between television performance, CIA-adjacent intrigue, a failed mayoral run, and decades of gatekeeping over who counted as a legitimate conservative intellectual. The book's pacing is uneven by design, dwelling in exhaustive detail on the National Review founding years while covering later decades more briskly, which tracks Tanenhaus's argument that the movement's formative period is where Buckley's influence was actually decided. It is less a defense of Buckley than an anatomy of how one magazine and one personality manufactured a coalition.