Sailing away: William F. Buckley's art of revealing nothing.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: On Political Books - Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography - Book Review

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography By William F. Buckley Jr. Regnery Publishing, $29.95

In the years before the record industry was unmanned by Napster, nobody was better at wringing every possible drop of profit from even the smallest of creative acts. Two minutes and 35 seconds of music could make money as a single, then also on an album, and then in a long version or a dance version or a live version, and then as a greatest hit, and then in a boxed set, and then as Dance Party Fifties or Protest Party Sixties repackaging, and then on a soundtrack, and so on, and on, until the day when people wake up with 12 versions of "Wild Thing" in their collection, and the Troggs and their assorted business associates have made many, many happy trips to the bank.

No one has ever been quite so clever about repackaging and reselling freelance journalism, but I'm deeply grateful William F. Buckley Jr. has been giving it a try. He has produced a number of anthologies over the years--mostly; I gather, collections of his columns on communism, the Panama Canal, and tattooing AIDS victims buttocks, as well as topics of similar significance. His latest effort, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, repackages a number of his writings from a large number of sources so that they rather loosely amalgamate into something like a life stow--tales of his youth, his passions and enthusiasms, some of the people he has known, plus lots and lots and lots of stories about sailing, laid end to end, from childhood to maturity. As a freelance writer, I salute Mr. Buckley, and honor his efforts to profit a second time from his struggles with the blank page (indeed, some of these writings, like introductions and toasts to people given at dinners, were never remunerated in their first incarnations, so it's high time their author got rewarded). This sort of thing should be done more often. There's no reason that the person who bought, read, and enjoyed Cruising Speed the first time around shouldn't buy, read, and enjoy the excerpt here; it's not like anybody memorized the thing, did they? You go, Bill! I hope you sell a million copies!

Still, we are forced to ask, when those million book buyers part with their $29.95, what are they actually going to get out of Miles Gone By? First, they're going to spend a lot of time with a singularly charming narrator. I have no idea what Buckley is like to live or work with, but in print he is almost always genial, witty, and...