Books by William F Buckley Jr
“I love William F Buckley Jr as a human being and as a presence in our public life. I was at a tribute once to Buckley and I said if I could be five per cent as effective on behalf of my own ideas as Buckley was on behalf of his, I would consider my life an enormous success. There was something about his open spirit that just appealed to me very much. You get the spirit of Buckley in some ways better in his fiction, and he wrote a lot of fiction. I was debating which novels to put on the list – he had a wonderful series based on a CIA agent called Blackford Oakes, a wonderful name for a CIA agent. The first one, I think, was called Saving the Queen. I have read religiously every Buckley spy novel as it came out. Spy novels would have been good to put on the list as a reflection of the Cold War Buckley. The reason I put the McCarthy book on the list is because Buckley came to public attention first, of course, with his book God and Man at Yale, but also with his robust defense of McCarthy in the 1950s.” Read more...
The best books on The Appeal of Conservatism
E J Dionne, Political Commentator
“What is important about God and Man at Yale is that, although it’s not the best argued or even the most serious of modern conservative books, it changed the argument. It made the conservative argument about culture. What Buckley is saying is that if you want to identify your adversary, he’s in the ivory tower of the Ivy League, and not only there, but in the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.” Read more...
The best books on Conservatism and Culture
Sam Tanenhaus, Journalist
Interviews where books by William F Buckley Jr were recommended
The best books on Conservatism and Culture, recommended by Sam Tanenhaus
Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013, explains how the American right reinvented itself as a cultural counter-revolution and selects five books as backgrounders to conservatism.
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1
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945
by George H Nash -
2
American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise 1865-1910
by Robert Green McCloskey -
3
Invisible Hands
by Kim Phillips-Fein -
4
The Neoconservatives
by Peter Steinfels -
5
The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy
by William F Buckley Jr
The best books on The Appeal of Conservatism, recommended by E J Dionne
The best books on The Appeal of Conservatism, recommended by E J Dionne
From immediate post-war battles against the New Deal to the rise of the neoconservative movement, Washington Post columnist and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, E J Dionne traces the growth of conservatism in America