William F. Buckley – författare

Airborne is how William F. Buckley, Jr. describes his sail across the wide Atlantic with his son and five friends. The trip, for fifteen years a dream, for fifteen months a planned operation, was always a risk: one doesn’t set out haphazardly in a small sailboat across 4,400 miles of ocean, and Buckley’s account of perils of the sea as experienced by himself since he acquired his first sailboat at age thirteen is at once graphic, instructive, and terrifying. But, we learn quickly, the concern is mostly for the prospect of thirty days and thirty nights away from the cosmopolitan jungle to which he and his friends are accustomed; their lair, so to speak. But it happened: notwithstanding vicissitudes amusing, annoying, and even dangerous, suddenly the schooner, and the entire trip, were airborne, and the experience resulted in a fusion of hopes, fears, ambitions, and pleasures that lifts the book from the category of mere chronicles of the sea, into a chronicle of our time, a passage of the spirit.

In 1980, Buckley gathered together his friends and set out to sail across the Atlantic. This is what he correctly describes as a “celebration” of that thirty-day event. Here are the calms and the storms, the melodrama and the rumination, the wine and the song, the navigation and the introspection that in Buckley’s distinctive blend capture the imagination of sailors and non-sailors, amuse the lighthearted and the dour, and engross the reader who wishes he were aboard, as also the reader who thanks heaven that he is not.

Racing Through Paradise is the third entry in Bill Buckley’s now classic sailing trilogy.

Here the irresponsible, eloquent, enjoyable Buckley guides us through his beloved Azores, and through the Galapagos (“the Bronx Zoo at the Equator”), about which he inclines more to Melville’s view than to Darwin’s, and through places such as Johnston Atoll, where mysteries and hostilities await. On a hilarious side adventure, we have a memorable encounter with “The Angel of Craig’s Point.”

Along the way, Buckley navigates among pleasant diversions as well as unforeseen navigational and philosophical shoals. He adroitly excerpts the candid journals of his shipmates, notably that of his son, Christopher, himself a best-selling novelist. The fine photographs by Christopher Little illustrate throughout. When Buckley’s Sealestial sails, finally, into New Guinea, we have shared a unique experience with a special breed of sailor, skipper, host, friend, and human being.