Recent reads:

Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley. The author of several successful novels of political satire (Thank You For Smoking, Boomsday, etc.) tackles a much bleaker subject: the deaths of his mother and father within a year of each other, and his own memories, thoughts and reactions to those losses. His parents, of course, were notable in their own right. William F. Buckley was one of the most influential political writers of the twentieth century, founder of National Review and a leading figure in the decades-long attempt to give political conservatism a respectable intellectual foundation. Patricia Taylor Buckley, though less well known to political mavens, was a prominent social figure in New York and a formidable personal presence to her family.

Buckley's reminiscences of his parents are both illuminating and entertaining, and some portions of the book read like the humorous stories told about a person at their wake. A chapter about his father's love of sailing, and of the many adventures and mishaps which resulted from his almost recklessly sanguine approach to seamanship, had me laughing out loud: "Over the years, my father took out entire sections of docks up and down the eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed on him the nickname 'Captain Crunch'...." And yet Buckley also has the respect and the awareness to note that "Pup's greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take great risks."

The literally morbid subtext of the book also gives Buckley plenty of room to exercise his bleaker, blacker sense of humor, as when he describes the unctuousness of funeral directors or the very strange world of funeral price accounting. And also discuss much more serious matters, such as his famously intellectual father's struggle with the gradual loss of some of his physical and mental agility.

Would that all of us accomplished so much with the time available to us, and were remembered in such fashion.