A long (a thousand pages, though it reads shorter), well-written, and intelligent take, both critical and admiring, on a complicated man. The book is a history of postwar American political life in the form of a biography of one of its actors. One relives a lot, and one learns a lot.
Colorful, comprehensive ... The narrative flows briskly: Tanenhaus streamlines decades of research and interviews ... Tanenhaus is fair to this complicated pundit — more than fair — and the payoff is worth it. Buckley is a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.
Tanenhaus’s biography of Buckley has arrived at last, and it is more or less the book conservatives feared it would be. The author is a gifted writer and a diligent scholar; his account is ably paced. But the Bill Buckley of this book is little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause and, though he got one or two big things right, propounded a muddled ideology and probably compounded the nation’s problems ... A book so long in the making was bound to sprawl, and this one does ... Buckley’s devotees will find it frequently irritating and occasionally enraging ... The size of this biography would seem to suggest an act of homage, but its effect is to reduce Buckley to smallness ... Tanenhaus’s decisions about what to include and exclude in this 1,000-page account frequently mystify.
Immersive ... Tanenhaus’s case for Buckley’s significance is mostly tacit, as the book curiously lacks a formal introduction ... Tanenhaus ably covers Buckley’s central role in the emergence of postwar conservative politics ... Engaging if unsurprising as political history, as biography the book raises more questions than it answers. Tanenhaus strives to distinguish between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend, but neither persona is fully rendered.
Marvelous ... It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life ... Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts.
[A] great white whale of a biography ... Buckley-style conservatism has become an antiquarian creed ... Buckley needed reassurance, afraid of being forgotten. This bulwark of a book ensures against that.
