What they're saying about Miles Gone By

From beginning to end Miles Gone By is Buckley at his best. The way he is able to lift stories of his own experience to the level of major insights is masterful. He is a 21st-century bearer of the mantle of the Polite Essay, as worn in times past by Hazlitt, Lamb, Shaw, Orwell, Mencken, and Muggeridge. "Blackford Oakes, b. 1975" is the most fascinating account I have ever read about the birth of a fictional character. We are talking about mastery of the use of the language.--Tom Wolfe

Then came Bill Buckley. Witty, deft in argument, willing to assert that the secular left had no monopoly on truth, he helped change the way the country thought of the right. Buckley was the movement's intellectual pastor, Reagan its successful political hero. He is one of a dwindling band of 20th-century giants who lived and worked at the nexus of books, politics, op-eds, and New York cocktail parties. Buckley embodied an unapologetic ideology but was such good company that even his most virulent foes were able to separate the personal from the political. Miles Gone By is at once entertaining and instructive. He fought the battle of ideas with grace for more than half a century and is an emblem of a time when the life of the mind and the life of the nation seemed intertwined.--Jon Meacham, The New York Times

Here is a riveting selection penned by the widely-acknowledged overlord of the English language. It is at once stoic, passionate, melancholy, combative, and triumphant. Miles Gone By is an incantation that conjures the range of human emotion at the command of a word-wizard.--Charles Davenport, The Charlotte Observer

Buckley started National Review to serve as a rallying point for conservatives who longed, in his oft-quoted words, to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." It did just that, and then some. No other American journalist in our time has done anything so consequential.--Terry Teachout, The Baltimore Sun

Mr. Buckley captures the mixed quality of experience, the undertow beneath a bright surface. He wonders whether, in his older age, he should give up his boat, the Patito, and thus, by inference, sailing itself--whether "the ratio of Pleasure to Effort" is holding its own or "creeping down," especially as physical exertion becomes ever more taxing. It is not a simple question, or a mundane one; in fact, it is profound, like so much in Miles Gone By.--Erich Eichman, The Wall Street Journal National Review did [its work] nobly and instructively as WFB--by dint of wit, learning and sheer inexhaustible energy--rose to the station of principal American interpreter of conservatism. --William Murchison, The Dallas Morning News

A marvelous glimpse of virtually every period of his very full life. I have enjoyed reading about his parents and his early school days, his time at Yale, his reminiscences about Whittaker Chambers, and his vignettes about other important figures and events in his life. I particularly enjoyed his reflections on how he came to imagine the main character in his novels, Blackford Oakes--the thinking, the rationale of the thing. I do not mean to denigrate his talents as polemicist and debater; there are few better--perhaps none. I only mean to emphasize that his range is much larger than the habitat in which we are used to finding him. His capaciousness of imagination and sense of delight in the mysteries and beauties of life are extremely vivid. His sheer artistry has not yet been paid the honor due it.--Michael Novak

Miles Gone By is less autobiography than heterobiography: the gaze is cast firmly outward, not inward. The model is not Augustine or even Montaigne; it certainly is not (thank God) Rousseau. What we have here is a chronicle of things done, not passions suffered, of people met, not feelings scrutinized, of issues debated, not emotions spent. That is doubtless one reason the book is such fun to read: it has the velocity and freshness of piqued curiosity--I almost said of a well-made martini.--Roger Kimball, The New York Sun

For many conservatives of today, the formative public figures were politicians such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. For some of us, though, the most significant influence was William F. Buckley, as we recited from his collections. As he retires from the public eye, having given up the TV program and the management of the magazine he founded, Miles Gone By is a valuable reminder of just what it was that drew people to Buckley as a writer and a person, then and now.--Bill Virgin, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

COPYRIGHT 2005 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning