Bøger af William F. Buckley

All the virtues of Bill Buckley's earlier books are here-but this one is profoundly different. The is completed (perhaps) the end of several affairs-and the capstone volume of a diarist-journal keeper-journalist, who has proved to be, over books at sea and on land (Cruising Sp...

Racing Through Paradise is the third entry in Bill Buckley's now classic sailing trilogy. It chronicles the author's four thousand-mile sailing voyage across the Pacific with four close friends, his son Christopher, and a photographer.

In 1980, Buckley gathered together his friends and set out to sail across the Atlantic. This is what he correctly describes as a "celebration" of that thirty-day event. Here are the calms and the storms, the melodrama and the rumination, the wine and the song, the navigation and the introspection that in Buckley's distinctive blend capture the imagination of sailors and non-sailors, amuse the lighthearted and the dour, and engross the reader who wishes he were aboard, as also the reader who thanks heaven that he is not.

Airborne is how William F. Buckley, Jr. describes his sail across the wide Atlantic with his son and five friends. The trip, for fifteen years a dream, for fifteen months a planned operation, was always a risk: one doesn't set out haphazardly in a small sailboat across 4,400 miles of ocean, and Buckley's account of perils of the sea as experienced by himself since he acquired his first sailboat at age thirteen is at once graphic, instructive, and terrifying. But, we learn quickly, the concern is mostly for the prospect of thirty days and thirty nights away from the cosmopolitan jungle to which he and his friends are accustomed; their lair, so to speak. But it happened: notwithstanding vicissitudes amusing, annoying, and even dangerous, suddenly the schooner, and the entire trip, were airborne, and the experience resulted in a fusion of hopes, fears, ambitions, and pleasures that lifts the book from the category of mere chronicles of the sea, into a chronicle of our time, a passage of the spirit.

An ambitious senator wants to weaken the power of the CIA, perhaps to the point of its elimination. To accomplish his goal, he tries to enlist Blackford Oakes--now retired--into his cause by forcing him to testify before a senate committee about CIA covert activities in 1985.

For God, for country, and for Yale... in that order, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote as the dedication of his monumental worka compendium of knowledge that still resonates within the halls of the Ivy League university that tried to cover up its political and religious bias. In 1951, a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate published his first book, which exposed the extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that prevailed at his alma mater. The book, God and Man at Yale, rocked the academic world and catapulted its young author, William F. Buckley Jr. into the public spotlight. Now, half a century later, read the extraordinary work that began the modern conservative movement. Buckleys harsh assessment of his alma mater divulged the reality behind the institutions wholly secular education, even within the religion department and divinity school. Unabashed, one former Yale student details the importance of Christianity and heralds the modern conservative movement in his preeminent tell-all, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

The year is 1964. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barry Goldwater are vying for the presidency, and CIA master spy Blackford Oakes has been sent to South Vietnam to halt its infiltration by men and materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Working out of Saigon with Tucker Montana, a shadowy Texan who designs a brilliant system for breaking the North's supply route, Blackford Oakes is caught up in the ambiguity and confusion generated as America's involvement in the conflict escalates. As Tucker's murky past, his torrid romance with the seductive Lao Dai, and the growing menace of global war come into focus, Oakes¿and Tucker¿find their loyalty called into question. Both men are forced to make a decisive move that will have consequences neither man can foresee.

An intricate plot involves the restoration of war-damaged windows in a famous German chapel. When Blackford Oakes takes a sabbatical from his work with the CIA, he finds neither peace nor sanctuary.