According to a recent study, young people are less able to read books from cover to cover than ever before. Rest assured, the Weekend Beacon stands athwart history yelling Stop, please sign your children up for this newsletter.

Speaking of standing athwart history, James Piereson reviews the highly anticipated biography Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus.

"When William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008, the United States lost its most articulate champion of conservative ideas. Over the course of a 60-year career in the public eye, Buckley did just about everything: published books and articles, lectured, wrote a newspaper column, edited a national magazine, advised politicians, and even ran for office. He was fortunate to live long enough to see the hopes he nourished as a young man come to pass when, after long and patient work, conservatives captured the Republican Party, elected a conservative president, and, most of all, promoted the policies that brought about the collapse of communism.

"This new biography by Sam Tanenhaus captures this theme by juxtaposing events in Buckley’s life against the evolution of the conservative movement from 1950 to the early years of the new century. The book is at once a chronicle of the life of a man but also a history of the era he helped to shape.

"Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America has been 30 years in the making and now appears on the 100th anniversary of Buckley’s birth. Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, worked closely on the project with Buckley himself, who may have expected it to appear during his lifetime rather than 17 years after his death. The book bears the marks of a long gestation: It runs to 860 pages of text, plus more than 100 pages of notes. Nevertheless, it was worth the wait. Tanenhaus’s biography is a lively chronicle of Buckley’s life that far surpasses in depth and detail all previously published efforts along these lines.

"There has long been a puzzling contradiction at the heart of Buckley’s life and career: He grew up in an atmosphere of European-style conservatism, aristocratic in outlook and disdainful of the masses, yet he launched a movement that sought to rouse the public against a corrupt establishment. Buckley, though drawn to politics, was not a popular leader: His eccentric style could never go over in a union hall or at a mass political rally. Still, he declared in the 1950s that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the collected wisdom of Harvard’s faculty. Buckley looked upon the conservative movement that he founded with a degree of ambivalence, approving its victories but perhaps not entirely comfortable with the means by which they were achieved."

From examining the conservative movement to examining ourselves, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb reviews Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker.

"Screening tests are best used in patients with a high risk for the disease in question. That is the best way to avoid over-diagnosis. If a person is at low risk for a cancer, say a 1 in 1,000 chance, and if the false positive rate for the diagnosis is 5 in 1,000, then any positive result has an 85 percent chance to be an error. The greater the risk the patient has the disease (for example, lung cancer in a heavy smoker), the greater likelihood that a positive screening test is a true finding. A false positive result on a chest X-ray can lead to a risky and unnecessary invasive procedure like a lung biopsy. This is the danger of over-diagnosis.

"Is there a solution to the problem of rational use of screening tests to avoid over-diagnosis? In O’Sullivan’s mind, a close working relationship between a trusted physician and patient will be the key to solving the dilemma. But the dilemma can only be solved on a personal basis. The highly anxious person may never be satisfied without complete knowledge of their clinical condition, and a 10 percent probability that they might die from prostate cancer will not be overcome by the 90 percent probability that they will outlive the cancer. But like most treatments, the therapies themselves have substantial risks and downsides. Prostatectomy is a major surgical procedure that can cure prostate cancer but can lead to chronic problems such as impotence as well as urinary incontinence.

"O’Sullivan believes that certain diagnoses—like chronic Lyme disease—that have been promoted as real entities have trapped patients in expensive and potentially dangerous treatment protocols when the diagnosis itself continues to be of dubious value. Long COVID may be another example of such a condition. Most of the patients with long COVID were not those critically ill but rather had mild or even no evidence of acute COVID. Many viral illnesses can produce prolonged symptoms without needing a specific label. Once the label is created, patients may convince themselves of other symptoms of the 'disorder' and actually become physically ill. This phenomenon is called a nocebo—the mirror image of placebo. Once labeled, these patients seem to develop a multitude of unrelated symptoms."