Airborne

<P>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 4400 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.</P><P></P>