What they're saying about Miles Gone By.(Book Review)

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 ...