My assumption is that people who read op-ed columns like books as gifts. So with the efficiency of Amazon Prime delivery and Christmas still three days away, a few suggestions:

Sam Tanenhaus' "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" lands on the centennial of William F. Buckley's birth. It's a book I've been waiting a long time for, both because of the almost impossible-to-exaggerate influence of Buckley on our post-World War II politics and the biographical skills of Tanenhaus, author of a magnificent biography of another important conservative figure, Whittaker Chambers.

Tanenhaus himself is no conservative and is quick to point out the lapses of judgement Buckley succumbed to over his long and unusually active life, including his support for Joe McCarthy and his opposition to the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s (later sincerely recanted), but he also credits Buckley for almost single-handedly bringing conservatism out of the post-war political wilderness, with making it coherent and intellectually respectable, including by driving out the crazies therein (most prominently and fortuitously the Birchers).

Without Buckley and National Review, there never would have been a Goldwater campaign and later, and more successfully, Ronald Reagan and the broader conservative movement.

Some of the more malicious sorts on the left have tried to trace the origins of........

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