While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics.

• Author: Rosenthal, Alan

The question all legislators face, at one point or another, is whether there is life after the legislature - or only life support. For many, the afterlife is higher office, that is, Congress or a statewide elective position. For some, it is lobbying. And for some, it is simply resuming their interrupted professional lives.

Precious few take an academic turn when they leave the legislature, but there are those who do. Frank Smallwood of Vermont, H.L. Richardson of California, Tom Loftus of Wisconsin, William R. Bryant Jr. of Michigan and Rod Searle of Minnesota have published books drawing on their experience. David Boren of Oklahoma, David Frohnmeyer of Oregon and Betty Castor and Sandy D'Alemberte of Florida have been appointed university presidents and have been able to make use of their experience.(*)

William M. Bulger, the former president of the Massachusetts Senate, may be unique among state legislators. Earlier this year he retired from the legislature to become president of the University of Massachusetts. Shortly, thereafter, his memoirs, While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics, officially went on sale in book stores. It is too early, of course, to assess Bulger's accomplishments at U. Mass., but the book is a good read - a witty and wise account of the practice of politics in the Bay State.

The release of the book on St. Patrick's Day is hardly accidental. Billy Bulger is the complete Irish politico (but one who also reads Latin and Greek), ever faithful to his local roots during his 35 years as a legislator, including 17 as a leader. His anchor has been South Boston, "Southie" as the neighborhood is called. It is a homogeneous, cohesive, proud place where residents refer to a trip into the central part of the city as "going to Boston." Bulger has gone far, but no matter how far he went, he never forgot where he came from.

Probably no other issue shows as dramatically the linkage between representative and constituency as the effort in the 1970s to create racial balance in the schools. Bulger writes emotionally about how forced busing disrupted ethnic communities in Boston, while the suburbanites and the wealthy whose children attended private schools sanctimoniously pointed fingers at neighborhood protests. He has particularly acerbic words for W. Arthur Garrity, the federal judge who presided over Boston's school integration. He writes that Garrity brought to the issue "the sensitivity of a chain saw and the foresight of a mackerel."

Bulger offers thumbnail sketches of Boston's political luminaries, a number of which could be described as scathing. (Scathing or not, I personally would not want to be...