Jan 26 2012
Today’s episode of Coffee & Markets features Darryl Hart discussing his book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American. PejamanYousefzadeh and I spoke with Hart about how conservatism was being undermined by the evangelical movement, how a post-evangelical community may not necessarily be identified with the Republican party and more.
Oct 28 2011
Terry Teachout finds the most recent William F. Buckley bio (Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism) disappointing:
Sure enough, Buckley is as fair-minded a study of its subject’s career as you could possibly expect from a contributor to The Nation and Tikkun. It deals bluntly but honestly with such difficult topics as his equivocal views on civil rights, and it gives him full credit for having purged the conservative movement of such “loonies” (Buckley’s word) as the members of the John Birch Society. Above all, Bogus recognizes that “Buckley and his colleagues changed America’s political realities,” both by making conservatism intellectually and socially respectable and by turning the GOP into something not far removed from a genuine conservative party.
But Buckley is too soberly written to be of interest to the average reader, and the only full-scale biography, John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (1988), is both outdated and overly partisan. The best thing published so far about Buckley is Richard Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr., and the Conservative Movement (2009), a sympathetic, at times startlingly candid memoir that describes him more vividly than anything other than Buckley’s own autobiographical volumes, of which Cruising Speed: A Documentary(1971) is the first and best. What is now needed is an up-to-date biography written by someone with the twin gifts of literary portraiture and historical perspective. This, alas, isn’t it.
Frustrating because I was looking forward to reading it (and probably still will).
Speaking of Richard Brookhiser, Richard Beeman finds his bio of James Madison worth reading:
The amount of scholarship chronicling these events is immense, and although Brookhiser is somewhat sparing in acknowledging his debts to historians who have preceded him, his sprightly narrative will serve as an entertaining introduction for those who are making their first acquaintance with Madison. Moreover, Brookhiser’s book is a useful corrective to some of the recent works in the fields of political science and law that place excessive emphasis on Madison the theorist.
For more on Brookhiser from my perspective, see the related articles links below.
And from a completely different perspective, Eloisa James brings a book to my attention (Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact By A. J. HARTLEY) that I think will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile:
Post Harry Potter, we can all sketch the outlines of a paranormal private school novel. Darwen Arkwright is a far odder and more creative addition to the genre than I have read in years. Darwen has powers of a sort…but he also has the ability to behave like a bumbler, like a dunce, like a grieving boy. The book never relies on paranormal flourishes alone to carry the reader’s interest. A. J. Hartley shows an uncanny, brilliant ability to shape the inner life of an unmoored child, who realizes that the worst thing of all is that there’s no one to be disappointed in him.
This sounds like a great fit for me and a potential read aloud book for my daughter.
Dec 6 2010
William F. Buckley (Christian Encounters Series)
Two things drew me to this short bio of William F. Buckley: the author Jeremy Lott is someone whose writings I have admired for some time and the subject, WFB, is something I have been interested in since high school.
So when I was offered a review copy it wasn’t a tough choice. As soon as I got it in the mail I breezed threw this brief biography - and promptly did nothing about it. As with so many other books, I read this back in the summer but did not get a chance to review it until now.
And? It is an excellent introduction to one of the central figures of the post-war conservative movement. But it is important to keep in mind that it is just that: an introduction.
You can’t do justice to a man like Buckley in less than 150 pages. But this book does what this type of book should do: give an interesting overview of the life and times of the subject and prompt the reader to seek out more.
Dec 6 2010
I am a big fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. Have been since high school. I have read nearly all of his books and have read a great deal about him.
So I was intrigued when I saw that an author who I enjoy, Jeremy Lott, had come out with a short bio of WFB as part of the Christian Encounters series at Thomas Nelson.
This was another book I read back in the summer but didn’t get a chance to review until now. I thought it would be useful to bring back the Ten Questions format and ask Jeremy to answer a few questions.
He graciously agree and the Q&A is below (my questions in bold)
1. How does viewing WFB through the lens of “prophet” help us understand him better?
It helps us to see how he saw himself, at least in part. I quote from a letter that William F. Buckley wrote to Ronald Reagan recounting Buckley’s appearance on the Tonight Show. WFB told Johnny Carson “that vaticide was the act of killing a prophet, and that if he wanted to go down as guilty of that crime, all he had to do was kill me.”
Now, this was a witticism, so we shouldn’t place too much weight on it, but neither should we ignore it. I argue that it was along the lines of what Ben Stiller’s villain White Goodman said several times in the movie Dodgeball. You remember? “I’m kidding, but not really.”
Keep Reading
Nov 19 2010
You have to wonder, under the circumstances, whether the ambitions of a young conservative novelist would be unreservedly encouraged and diligently nurtured in a contemporary MFA program.
If the answer is no, then the ramifications are profound — and profoundly disturbing. For the issue here runs deeper than the run-of-the-mill ideological browbeating that goes on in college classrooms across the country. Students can always weigh their professors’ rants against more moderate views, and indeed contrary ones, that they hear off campus. But MFA programs now seem to exercise a gatekeeper function. If you don’t pass through one of them, your odds of literary recognition are vastly diminished. It may be that we’re cutting off future generations of conservative novelists at the knees.
That’s not fair. Fairness, though, is a secondary consideration. If conservatives are being denied entrée into the halls of literary production — not by a sinister gentlemen’s agreement but by an inbred ideological disdain — then what we’re cutting off is not just a group of writers, or a political agenda, but an entire sensibility.
Be sure to read the whole thing.
