William F. Buckley and the Conservative Future

The biography that Sam Tanenhaus began in 1998, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, has finally been published. Part of the reason Tanenhaus spent one year writing for every three that William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) spent living is that Buckley’s cruising speed, to borrow one of his memoirs’ titles, was overdrive, to borrow another. He wrote more than 50 books, some 5,600 syndicated columns, and hundreds of editorials for National Review, the magazine he founded and edited. It seems entirely possible that Tanenhaus read them all.