A Soulless Biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
At 1,040 pages, Sam Tanenhaus's biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is a book you can't pick up once you put it down. Barton Swaim truly does the heavy lifting in 'More Than a Man of His Time' (Books, May 31). Despite the book's subtitle, there is far less 'life' in Mr. Tanenhaus's biography than there is an indictment of what he calls Buckley's 'Revolution That Changed America.'
Mr. Tanenhaus is a 'gifted writer and a diligent scholar,' as Mr. Swaim says. His book isn't a screed but something worse. The soul of WFB, so apparent for those who knew him—and the subject of the second book under review, Lawrence Perelman's 'American Impresario'—is conspicuously absent in this telling. Mr. Tanenhaus gives readers a hollow portrait of a reckless leader with his hands off the tiller, crashing into the docks of Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and other sundry characters. As a young research assistant for Buckley's novel 'Spytime' (2000), written over a winter skiing together in Gstaad, Switzerland, I discovered a mentor who always looked to others for the next plot twist and scene location. He rejoiced in turning over the wheel, even if it meant burning out the clutch, as I promptly did to his manual transmission Peugeot.
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