Down! Set! Tut! Tut!(Review)

• Author: Buckley, Christopher

Hiking Toward Bethlehem

"Never, ever review one's friends' books," Jonathan Yardley writes of an apparently unhappy episode in his long friendship with the late J. Anthony Lukas. It's probably a good rule, though I do think it is absolutely essential to review one's enemies' books. But I'm going to proceed nonetheless, because I want to say for the record, for whatever it's worth, that this, his most recent collection of his Monday morning Washington Post columns establishes him--yet again!--as America's most durable bull detector. Yardley is to cant, pretension, and fatuity as electric bug zappers are to summer moths. Susan Cheerer writing yet another book about the ordeal of being John Cheever's daughter? Zzzzzap. Puff of smoke. Maureen Dowd trying to score a few easy points off the hide of David Brinkley? "Oh, get off it!" Zzzap. David Remnick of the New Yorker, slyly, engagingly attempting to insert a pedestal between Howard Stern and the dirt, so as to elevate him into a figure of cultural significance? Not so fast, pal. Barbra Streisand, peddling her Weltanschauung at Harvard? Puh-leeze. And don't get him started on Joyce Maynard.

Whether this exigence is the result of Yardley's flinty Wasp temperament, or of his natural instinct to ascend the pulpit or wield the ferrule (he is descended from a long line of preachers and teachers), or simply of crankiness born of having to write these columns on Sunday, while the rest of us are scratching our terry-robed behinds and mixing Bloody Marys--who can say? But these dissatisfactions have provided grand entertainment and wisdom over the years. Many an otherwise joyless Monday a.m. have been rendered more tolerable by his well-reasoned, witty fulminations over the continuing, appalling decline of--just about everything.

I remember the morning I found this delicious lead staring up at me from the breakfast table, and was delighted to find it again here:

Among the institutions upon which Washington prides itself, surely special honor must be accorded the National Prayer Breakfast. Held but once a year--evidently on the implicit understanding that once a year is quite sufficient--this august occasion assembles under one roof the most extensive collection of duplicity, of human hypocrisy, that has ever been gathered together in Washington, with the possible exception of when Richard Nixon prayed alone.

You could clone the whole of Yardley's sensibility from this one strand of DNA. It bears all the...