If you want to hear my guest on the show today, Sam Tanenhaus, talk in depth about his magisterial new biography of William F. Buckley, which if there’s justice in the world will win all the awards, I recommend you listen to Andrew Sullivan’s interview with Tanenhaus, or the Know Your Enemy interview with Sam, or the Robert Wright interview.
I say this because although Sam and I certainly talk in some detail about the book, and about Buckley, it’s not the exclusive focus of the conversation. As you’ll be able to tell, if you get into it, he and I have so many shared reference points that we kind of just go where the spirit takes us. We talk about his wonderful biography of Whittaker Chambers, which was really important to me in my writing of Exit Right, we talk about Exit Right. We talk about Sam’s 11 year tenure as editor of the New York Times Book Review, which I was somewhat surprised to learn he hasn’t really talked about at much length before.
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