Book reviews: 'Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America' and 'How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time'

'Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America' by Sam Tanenhaus

Though William F. Buckley Jr. was often imitated, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker, "at heart he was inimitable." Sam Tanenhaus' long-awaited new biography of this key figure in the rise of postwar American conservatism is "a well-written and intelligent take on a complicated man," and it reminds us that Buckley helped found and sustain the movement while being more an entertainer than a thinker. As a syndicated columnist, the founder of National Review, and the longtime host of PBS's Firing Line, Buckley helped repopularize the moribund Republican Party, and he earned a crowning triumph when his friend Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Even his foes tended to like him, thanks to his personal warmth and charm. Still, given his firm belief in rule by the elite and his opposition to democratic egalitarianism, "it seems fair to say that Buckley was, at bottom, anti-American."

Tanenhaus' "marvelous" 1,000-page book complicates the standard view of Buckley's legacy, said Jack McCordick in The New Republic. While it's common to credit the preppie pundit for having been a responsible leader who purged the conservative movement of its crazies, including the John Birch Society, Tanenhaus refuses to paint Buckley's conservativism as sunnier than today's. Though he provides an affectionate portrait of Buckley as a social figure and describes him as almost liberal in his openness to entertaining conflicting political views, he "also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement." Whether Buckley was defending racial segregation, blasting university elites, or stirring up anti-Communist paranoia, the political vision that he helped forge "was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies."

Tanenhaus is without doubt "a gifted writer," said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. That's probably why Buckley handpicked him as his biographer in 1997. But Tanenhaus, who later became the editor of The New York Times Book Review, is a left-leaning thinker who has assumed the role of explaining the Right to nonbelievers, and the Buckley he portrays here is "little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause" and, in the end, "probably compounded the nation's problems." But he misreads Buckley's views on key issues, including supply side economics and South African apartheid, and his decisions about what to mention and what to exclude "frequently mystify." Unfortunately, Tanenhaus' Buckley turns out to be "more or less the book conservatives feared it would be"— and proof that "Bill Buckley always was too trusting of people he liked."

'How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time' by Amy Larocca

Author Amy Larocca is "far from the only woman who has chased the idea of being not just healthy but well," said Sheila McClear in The Atlantic. But the former New York magazine fashion editor has now also thrown herself into exploring the full depth and breadth of the wellness craze. Larocca "can't deny being a willing participant as well as a skeptic." When she submits to a colonic cleanse and says she hopes it will help her reach a higher plane, "she's being somewhat facetious—but only somewhat." She understands that as the dysfunction of the U.S. health-care system has driven people to seek alternative paths to health and serenity, wellness has grown into not just a $6.6 trillion global business but a new religion with adherents on the both the Right and Left.

How to Be Well reads "like a fun-house mirror held up to my Gen X soul," said Jill Kargman in Air Mail. Besides providing "a fascinating history of wellness," Larocca has also constructed "a searing portrait of over-the-top 'well' women in search of meaning." She has met "the bone-broth sippers, the meditation gurus, and the breath-work believers," and she shows how fitness devotion becomes, for many of them, a tie into a tribe distinguished by fervent faith. Women, she points out, have probably been disproportionately enthusiastic about wellness in part because their health concerns have been neglected by doctors. She's also good at showing how fringe wellness practices creep into the mainstream, and she does it all by mixing "a healthy dose of curiosity" with "a dash of cayenne-pepper cynicism."

Because the book's second half tries to cover so much ground, it "reads like a survey course," said Elisabeth Egan in The New York Times. "But when Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence, and sex positivity, she's at her best— authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy." Though not every wellness product or service is a scam, she's "refreshingly" honest about the motives of most of the companies and influencers pushing them. Their job is to persuade consumers to keep coming back and buying products and services. "That, as How to Be Well wisely shows us, is the bottom line."