Word: buckleys
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once, when he was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. flew an airplane from Boston to New Haven, Conn., at night after a total of an hour and a half of flight training. Buckley also smoked, drank, ate peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches and took pills by the fistful. He was a reckless sailor who crossed three oceans--his terrified crews nicknamed him Captain Crunch. He abominated seat belts, and in his later life he developed the unnerving habit of urinating out the open doors of cars going at full speed. Buckley, an icon of the modern conservative movement, died...
...Buckley died just 10 months after his wife Patricia, who was 80. Their son Christopher has written a memoir of that difficult year titled Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve; 251 pages). Christopher--as we will call him to avoid muddling our Buckleys--is best known as a comic novelist (Thank You for Smoking, Supreme Courtship), and in taking on such a tragic, personal subject, he's punching well above his weight class. But his sense of the absurd turns out to be oddly well suited to observing the numerous medical and existential indignities associated with dying, as well...
...William Buckley once wrote to an admirer that the secret of happiness was "Don't grow up." He never quite did. This forced his son to grow up all the faster, to the point where he could actually forgive his father's failings or at least laugh about them (though there is an element of Oedipal assassination in this lovingly unflattering portrait). The poetry of Losing Mum and Pup--and it has some--arises from the fact that even extraordinary people are not exempt from the pedestrian, democratic reality of death. When Christopher complains about his father's driving...
...Burke's thinking can be summed up easily: Respect reality. Understand the age you're living in, and understand its facts. As William F. Buckley said more than two years before his death, "Conservatism implies a certain submission to reality." But the approach championed by Burke and Buckley is a far cry from the mind-set embraced by today's Republican Party...
...Buckley, Christopher • loss of larger-than-life parents of is touchingly yet entertainingly chronicled...