Miles Gone By
A Literary Autobiography
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Miles Gone By
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Narrated by:
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William F. Buckley
In this autobiography, woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than fifty years, you’ll meet William Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of ten children; Buckley the political enfant terrible, whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a New York Times bestseller; Buckley the editor of the National Review, hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; Buckley the family man; Buckley the spy and novelist of spies; and Buckley the bon vivant. You’ll also meet Buckley’s friends: Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, David Niven, and many others.
Along the way, listeners will be treated to Buckley’s romance with wine, his love of the right word, his intoxication with music, and his joy in skiing and travel.
©2004 William F. Buckley Jr. (P)2005 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Critic reviews
“As ever, sheer delight from humor and prose, whatever the political faith.”
(John Kenneth Galbraith)“What Buckley has is a sort of sparkle and grace, equally in his speaking, writing, and television appearances…Free minds are desperately rare and precious, and in him I detect one.”
(Malcolm Muggeridge)“[Buckley was] an instant darling of conservatives who needed a spirited new voice.”
(Publishers Weekly)“Buckley reads his own essays with a wit and joy worthy of listeners’ attention.”
(AudioFile)This semiautobiography is organized as a collection of essays and textual fragments gathered from his long and illustrious career. Some of the bits are more interesting than others, but the sheer scope of the material, combined with a firm editorial hand, makes for an epic journey without much extra fluff.
I said without much. Were I blessed with any interest in sailing, I would have given this book five stars. The passion comes through, but so does the obsession. Like the ocean itself, it's too big for its own good, skipper. I'd say skip it.
My favourite bits include the recollections of his childhood and adolescence, the intriguing saga of the divisive university politics at Yale, the passionate love letter to wine, the transcript of the famous Panama debate with Reagan, the copious pages of political and literary gossip, and the amusing asides on a dozen trivialities enlivened with wit and irony. All of it is served with honey; on nigh every page you can taste the sweet and unswerving devotion, by Mr. Buckley, to mastering the peculiar manners, the power and the vocabulary of the English tongue.
Buckley is no saint. While I loathe his Catholic mysticism and warmongering apologetics, there is no conservative I'd rather have around today. He was never anything less than idealistic. He was deadly precise in his reactionary fervour and always honest in his dealings, which gave progressives some healthy target practice - and a good model to emulate on the other side.
Being dangerous enough to be taken seriously is already an impressive, lasting legacy, but this is not the best engraving on his tombstone. No. Buckley's greatest contribution, I believe, was his cultivation, by word and deed, of the power of reasoned debate.
He showed us that there is no controversy that cannot be made more tolerable by being placed on the Firing Line. Without "frenemies" like him to keep us straight, the endangered art of civility will sink to the sea with the Titanic and Atlantis.
Witty and illuminating
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