WindFall

<P>All the virtues of Bill Buckley’s earlier books are here—but this one is profoundly different. 1990 was a very good year producing vintage Buckley. He celebrated deeply meaningful anniversaries: the fortieth year of his marriage; the fortieth since his graduation from Yale; the thirty-fifth from <I>National Review</I> the magazine he founded and then decided—to considerable shock—to retire from editing. In the year in which he became a senior citizen he appeared daringly as a harpsichordist with two symphony orchestras; wrote a controversial book advocating voluntary national service a proposal not calculated to endear him to his fellow conservatives; and endured the death of a close friend. Thus 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 (<I>Cruising Speed The Unmaking of a Mayor Airborne Atlantic High Overdrive Racing Through Paradise</I>) both his own Boswell and Johnson. </P><P></P>