Word: buckleys
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Christopher Buckley's most recent book is Little Green Men (Random House...
...Talk of Many Things" comes with dust jacket blurbs from, among others, George McGovern and John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, Buckley's old pal and ideological nemesis, helps take some of the partisanship out of the proceedings by calling the book "sheer delight from humor and prose, whatever the political faith." I also am a friend of Buckley's, and I confess to viewing him through the lens of an immense affection...
...course, you may enjoy the book more if you share Buckley's political faith (an elegantly consistent conservatism extending back to the origins of the Cold War), but it is not necessary that you do so. It will also help if you share Buckley's delight in the English language. He runs words through his fingers like doubloons. He likes to superimpose a trelliswork of formulations from the Greek or Latin (grids of the apodictic, the epistemological, the asymptotic) upon the subject at hand. Lacking the Latinate, he goes to the Latin - "pari passu," "tu quoque." Either you enjoy these...
...Buckley irritates a lot of people. He flicks his eyes like high beams at an adversary; he speaks in an accent all his own. In quarters where "elitist" is the dirtiest word in the English language, Buckley's very existence (the Bach, the ocean sailing) is a provocation. But only the captious would miss the coherence and steadfastness of Buckley's thought and work over many years. I was surprised yesterday when I read a new book of essays on America by a British journalist named Martin Walker. Walker accuses Buckley of being "self-indulgent." If Walker will explain...
...Talk of Many Things" is proof, if it were needed, that for the last 50 years Buckley has been a presence - witty, scathing, philosophical, generous, often surprisingly tender - in the middle of the American conversation. Well, not in the middle; on the right, but perfectly audible elsewhere. His book of speeches is, among other things, a guided tour of the last half century. I am impressed, reading these speeches, at how often Buckley's assessments at the time have been dead-on - about Mao's cultural revolution, about Norman Mailer, about other extravagances. I like the way that Buckley stated...