Miles Gone by or Right Is Wrong

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography

Author: William F Buckley Jr

In celebration of his 80th birthda, Regnery presents Bill Buckley's New York Times bestseller. Included are treasured essays from the beloved founder of National Review that captures Buckley's joyful boyhood and family life.

The New York Times - Jon Meacham

Reading Miles Gone By, his latest collection of autobiographical pieces, a book of charm and grace and wit, one finds it virtually impossible to envision Buckley as his liberal critics have for so long: as a dark Goldwaterite, even a pro-crypto Nazi (Gore Vidal's phrase), who hides his extremism beneath a sophisticated Manhattan veneer. He is a partisan combatant, a key figure in the right wing's journey from the fringes of American politics to the mainstream -- from, roughly, Joe McCarthy's sweaty brow to Ronald Reagan's sunny smile. But agree or disagree with the conservative creed he helped shape and promulgate, Buckley is the happiest of warriors, an exuberant man of the right, a Roman Catholic who has apparently taken the reassurances of Scripture to heart. ''In the world ye shall have tribulation,'' Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John, ''but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.''

Caspar Weinberger - Forbes

This has been an especially good reading summer for devotees of American Colonial and Revolutionary his-tory. First and, in my opinion, the best of the many new books covering this period is Washington's Crossing--by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press, $35). Professor Fischer is a noted historian, whose Albion's Seed, published in 1989, tells the story of those descendants of the British who settled here and helped create the United States. His Paul Revere's Ride has also been widely and justly praised.

Washington's Crossing tells the complete story of General George Washington's most daring, risky and successful venture early in the war. Following a succession of victories by the British and their mercenary forces, which had resultedin the loss of New York for the Americans, the British were within sight of Philadelphia, where the new American Congress was sitting.

Washington's army had been all but destroyed, and the British were surging across New Jersey. Washington's decision to cross the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776, when it was considered virtually impossible, was a move both bold and foolhardy. A flotilla of small boats crammed with soldiers, guns and horses somehow rowed across the river through one of the East's worst winter snow and ice storms. (The crossing as painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851 captured this event spiritually and has become a great icon of the Revolution.) By crossing the Delaware, Washington placed the remnants of his army in a position to trap the British behind Trenton and, a few days later, to give that army and the cause for which it fought its first real victory. In many ways the shots fired atTrenton were the shots "heard round the world."

Professor Fischer conveys in a remarkably realistic way what combat and the fog of war are actually like. But, more important, he tells the story of what it was like for Washington to lead a discouraged, underequipped army that was constantly being micromanaged by a divided Congress that couldn't--at least at the beginning--decide whether it wanted independence or, simply, to get the Stamp Act repealed.

For those who still wonder how the Revolutionaries ever defeated the huge British forces arrayed against them, both on land and at sea, this book makes clear that it was the military genius and leadership of George Washing-ton that turned almost certain defeat into victory. Washington's Crossing is an essential and exciting key to a more complete understanding and appreciation of what our ancestors did to win the Revolution.

A new biography, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press, $35), is another superb book I read this summer. Hamilton served as principal aide to General Washington from the early days of the Revolu-tion. This gave him a ringside seat at the formation of the United States and its implausible victory over the British, who had deployed one of the world's finest military machines but lost to a ragtag army of upstarts.

Chernow's splendid, thorough and brilliantly written biography gives us a new understanding of Hamilton's vi-tal role during the war and immediately after as Secretary of the Treasury of this new entity on the world's stage. I doubt that many people realize how much of our country's financial structure we owe to Alexander Hamilton. This book goes beyond the standard fare offered in most American history classes. Hamilton's towering intellect, as well as his many faults, and his long, fierce disagreements with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and many of the other Founding Fathers are presented here with almost shocking candor.

There have been other biographies of Hamilton, but Chernow's is far and away the most comprehensive and compelling of any I have read. It is a fitting tribute to the man who set the U.S. on the path that has made our nation the economic leader of the world.

Another treat for Revolutionary history enthusiasts is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin Press, $25.95). This delightful new study focuses on the actual aristocratic and elitist views and opinions of this so-called populist leader, who was one of our best-loved, most influential and renowned spokesmen to the world.

Moving away from Revolutionary times, I next read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography byWilliam F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery Publishing, $29.95). Buckley, a major founder of today's sen-sible conservatism, has led an extraordinary life, which fully matches his extraordinary talents. His subtitle is apt, as the book contains essays on sailing, skiing, music, old friends and colleagues and all manner of other diverse subjects, which are united in that they have all been of interest to one of the best minds and writers in America today.

Publishers Weekly

The conservative writer and Firing Line host has published so many millions of words in five decades of polemics and public musing that amassing a sort of autobiography required little more than sandwiching a selection of 50 essays between a brief preface and epilogue. The extracts range in subject from his silver-spoon boyhood and boarding-school days to the lives and deaths of the many prominent people he has known. Fame came early, with Buckley's 1951 God and Man at Yale, excerpted here, which lambasted liberal bias at elite American colleges. (Far superior, though, is the sparkling memoir of his war-veteran class of 1950 at Yale.) An instant darling of conservatives who needed a spirited new voice, Buckley founded the National Review, whose writers became the core of his widening circle of influential acquaintances. While sailing, touring and media punditry take up much of the collection, the most memorable pieces are about such offbeat friends as the tragic Whittaker Chambers. Nevertheless, some portraits are merely laudatory epitaphs. Approaching 80, Buckley notes that his sporting days are about over, but "[s]o to speak, I can still ski on a keyboard." Like skiing, his keyboard has its ups and downs. B&w photos. Agent, Lois Wallace. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	At home
	Life at Great Elm	3
	Life at Great Elm II	11
	St. John's, Beaumont	17
	The "distinguished" Mr. Buckley	36
	Wine in the blood	39
	Wine : one man's happy experiences	42
	William Frank Buckley, 1881-1958	48
	Aloise Steiner Buckley, 1895-1985	51
	Yale
	God and man at Yale	57
	A toast to the class of 1950	95
	Reflections on life after Yale	104
	Wartime
	Army life	115
	Sailing (and skiing, and one fly-by)
	We must sail across the ocean!	123
	Christmastime in the Caribbean	145
	Gulf stream musings	164
	Meet me at K club	174
	A quickie, Bahamas to Charleston	179
	Pleasure on skis	191
	Alta, my alta	197
	Six freshmen and an Ercoupe	206
	The angel of Craig's point	217
	A sail across the Pacific	228
	Aweigh	240
	People
	Ten friends	255
	Five colleagues	282
	And a sixth	292
	Remembering
	Whittaker Chambers, 1901-1961	299
	Murray Kempton, 1917-1997	318
	Henry Regnery, 1912-1996	330
	National Review, b. 1955	338
	Blackford Oakes, b. 1975	343
	William Shawn, 1907-1992	354
	Firing line, 1966-1999	362
	Language
	The dictionary, ready at hand	391
	The conflict over the unusual word	395
	On writing speedily	400
	Getting about
	1001 days on the Orient Express	409
	Definitive vacations	421
	A pilgrimage to Lourdes	427
	The stupefaction of the New England coastline	443
	A performance with the symphony, coming up	446
	The life of the public speaker	455
	Going down to the Titanic	469
	Aboard the Sea Cloud	482
	Politics
	My own secret right-wing conspiracy	501
	Running for mayor of New York City	518
	Social life
	Querencia : on coping with social tedium	545
	The threatened privacy of private clubs	553
	Why don't we complain?	558
	Epilogue : thoughts on a final passage	569

Books about: Art of Plank Grilling or Good Beer Guide West Coast USA

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness)

Author: Arianna Huffington

With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year’s presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country.

Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element—the “lunatic fringe” of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture.

But they haven’t done it on their own: they have been enabled by a compliant media that act as if there is no such thing as truth and are more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable, and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again.

Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.


From the Hardcover edition.

Publishers Weekly

Political commentator and Huffington Post blog creator Huffington offers her own take on the politics of the upcoming 2008 presidential election, studying the recent pitfalls and economic downturn induced by the current regime. Her reading is filled with her trademark hard-hitting sense of humor and controversial opinions, lashing out at the Republican Party in this impassioned audio. Her reading is solid and her opinions bear a weighty truth even if they are questionable at times. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 14). (May)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Donna L. Davey, Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

The blog Huffington cofounded is among the most read, and the 200,000-copy first printing assumes that her book will be popular, too. Huffington organizes her text thematically, e.g., by the media, Congress, the "War on Science," Iraq, torture, and immigration. Noting how "moral values" became a brand for the Right, she provides many highlighted boxes showing examples of Right inconsistencies. For all public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Noted conservative doyenne turned noted liberal doyenne Huffington (On Becoming Fearless . . . in Love, Work, and Life, 2006, etc.) enumerates all the ways in which the GOP has gone astray. Born in Greece, Huffington knows the meaning of the word apostate. In a sidebar, "My Name is Arianna, and I Am a Former Republican," she recounts her road to the Damascus moment, which took the hulking form of Newt Gingrich, who appropriated some of her compassionate conservatism and put it in his Social Darwinist blender. "I was seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled," she reports, but not for long. The liberal convictions that followed seem of a piece with the progressivism of her moderate Republican ways, and indeed most of her notions are centrist: her belief, for instance, that ending poverty will call for a combination of public and private effort, and that the government has no business in the bedrooms of consenting adults. Like so many of the time, she has a soft spot in her heart for Ronald Reagan, who opened the door for what she characterizes as the right-wing takeover of the party by the likes of Bush and Cheney-and Coulter ("the right-wing punditry's equivalent of crack or crystal meth"), Limbaugh, O'Reilly and company-as the radical fringe became the radical core. Huffington chastises the media for allowing this rightist cabal to proceed unchallenged, a charge that sticks but needs more elaboration than she provides. Elsewhere she walks down any number of well-trod paths: the lies about WMDs and the Freudian reasons for toppling Saddam, the right wing's war on science, the abuse of the Constitution, the quest for saviors in the form of General David Petraeus (for Bush, "a magic word,"though a "thunderingly misguided" commander), the contempt for expertise. John McCain, Huffington ventures, will bring more of the same. There is little effort at prescription here, but much complaint. Liberally inclined readers will find little that's new; since anyone else will be unlikely to pay attention, this seems a slightly misguided effort. First printing of 200,000