PanThe Washington PostA Man and His Presidents is a rather poor biography of Buckley, consistently preoccupied with the trivial at the expense of the significant. Yet the book offers some important and perhaps unintended insights into the unraveling of the conservative movement. The principal weakness of Felzenberg’s biography is that it contains little in the way of serious intellectual history. A reader otherwise unacquainted with Buckley’s work would come away with the impression that he never wrote anything beyond acerbic one-liners and forgettable novels ... Without any coherent treatment of the deeper intellectual currents shaping Buckley’s positions, there is nothing to hold the narrative together. The book is less a biography than a breezy history of the major political events that occurred during Buckley’s lifetime. And since Buckley’s career spanned a period from before World War II to the Iraq War, no single episode can be examined in any depth ... Nevertheless, A Man and His Presidents offers some insight into the collapse of Buckley’s conservative movement precisely because its weaknesses as a biography coincide with the weaknesses of movement conservatism.