Book Nook

Christopher Buckley's memoir regarding his parents, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley, mixes childhood memories and anecdotes with the serious business of dealing with their final illnesses and deaths within an 11 month period.

Losing Mum and Pup doesn't pull any punches and frankly there were a few anecdotes and insights regarding his dad that I would have been happy not to read.

Given his unique position as only child, Buckley offers a obviously subjective view of his childhood and adult relationships with his parents, each of whom had strong personalities and were well known, successful, and respected in their individual adult worlds.

This certainly caused tensions in their long marriage and generated no shortage of self-esteem issues for their sole child.

As a writer and thinker, William F. Buckley Jr. had a strong influence on my intellectual growth and emerging prose style during my high school and college years. His talk show, Firing Line, was don't miss television in our household and for a number of years my annual subscription to National Review magazine was a cherished Christmas gift.

At one time I had the pleasure of spending about 10 minutes chatting with him at a sparsely attended political fundraiser in North Jersey for a cause that I can no longer recall. He graciously autographed for me a copy of his latest book The Unmaking of a Mayor (sadly this highly entertaining volume about his 1965 New York City mayoral quest appears to be out of print).

For reasons unknown to me, television personality Fran Allison, longtime host of the popular and long running Kukla, Fran and Ollie puppet show, was also at that event. She, too, was very gracious.

In the end, it was appropriate that he died at his writing desk, having written scores of books, several thousand newspaper columns, and countless articles and essays during his lifetime. He was truly a writer's writer.