Rating: 
Summary: I'm not bitter
Review: A collection of essays and other little bits by the scion of William F. Buckley. You know, Christopher probably hates the fact that his family connection is constantly brought up in reviews, and I would be a touch more sensitive to his feelings, but, frankly, I think he's profited from it and why not give credit where it is due? I'll admit it--I'm envious. Here was a boy born with a golden dictionary in his hand and money to boot. And then he gets to go to Harvard, work on the Lampoon, be an editor at Forbes (and do a little junket travel as detailed in one of the more nauseatingly sycophantic articles here), write speeches for the Vice-President, and then he becomes a best- selling humorist. I'm so green with envy I'm sitting here looking a bit like the Incredible Hulk. It wouldn't be quite so bad except that he even sounds like a nice guy, someone that I could be friends with (if I was wealthy or a politician or a fashion designer or the owner of my own company or you get the picture). Even his politics don't rub me quite the wrong way as his fellow conservative humorist, P.J. O'Rourke. I liked these little essays so much that I probably won't be able to resist something else by Buckley, most likely his satire on the tobacco lobby, Thanks for Smoking. Damn--I wish I had written that.
Rating:
Summary: Humorous, Insightful, and a Little Snobby
Review: Although I truly enjoyed this book, by the time I finished I really had a good sense of East Coast life, especially those who mix in circles where royalty is called by their first names while on a cruise down the Amazon! Some chapters in this collection of essays are laugh-out-loud funny, such as 'Hemlines of History'; others taught me a lot about aircraft and aircraft carriers; still others had me bored and wondering if the essay was supposed to be poking fun at the elite, or written in complete seriousness about a world I know nothing about, nor really care about. Maybe its because I live on the West Coast, and we are more informal, but some of Buckley's concerns and gripes don't seem all that important to me. However, I do recommend this book because it is well written and a wonderful example of the lost art of essay writing.
Rating: 
Summary: truly funny collection
Review: American conservatives are doomed to suffer in squaredom for a simple reason (besides weak hair): their stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval. Whatever virtues this state may possess, hipness is not one of them. Fred MacMurray may be an admirable paterfamilias and a model of bourgeois rectitude, but he will not win the dance contest on Soul Train. The Right has a serious fun problem. Like evil runes possessed of a curious power, the words carved on the id of every teenager worth her salt -- sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll -- send conservatives into a howling, medieval fury. The inconvenient fact is that all hipness contains a spice of nihilism, a tiny but flavorful soupcon of who-gives-a-****, that is anathema to the Right. To the degree that conservative writers embrace Cool Style, they simply cease to be conservative. -REVIEW : of "Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing," edited by David Brooks (GARY KAMIYA, Salon) That statement is, I suppose, fairly typical of how the Left views conservatives, and may in fact be largely true. But it misses two extremely salient points : (1) those who do embrace Cool Style cease to be humorous, after all, if you think it's perfectly fine to engage in wildly varied sexual experimentation, then 99% of the jokes ever told in the history of man, particularly those with sheep in them, no longer have punch lines; (2) no the Right isn't out having this sort of fun, we're home with our wives making jokes about the hipster doofuses that think that such behavior makes them cool. [Recall the hilarious Republican response to Ted Kennedy's 1988 Democratic convention speech, where he used the tagline "Where was George ?" Answer : Home in bed with Barbara, sober.] Humor, particularly satirical humor, by its very nature, requires you to take a pretty jaundiced view of humankind; it practically requires the stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval, which Kamiya finds so offensive. The natural result is that almost all of the humorous political writing in America today is being done by conservatives. The collection that is panned above, for instance, includes an embarrassment of riches, including Joe Queenan, PJ O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Buckley. Wry Martinis meanwhile is a collection of twenty years worth of the writings of Christopher Buckley--an editor at Forbes FYI, regular contributor to the back page of The New Yorker, former speech writer to Vice President Bush, and the son of William F. Buckley. The book contains many funny pieces ranging from travel essays to book reviews. Among the funniest are his NY Times review of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which is so scathing that it provoked a mini-feud between the two. It starts by citing Mark Twain : Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up." "Debt of Honor," the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience. And things get really ugly thereafter. One of Buckley's favorite devices, especially in his New Yorker bits, is to take one seemingly innocent item out of the news and then spin a comedic scenario around it. Among the factoids that get this treatment : * 'They both come to my house. We serve them a Martini. And we have an exchange between the two.' -Tom Brokaw in The New York Times, proposing an alternative presidential-debate format * A group of conservative political operatives is expected to announce today the launching of the Conservative TV Network, a 24-hour pay cable-television channel expected to debut in early 1996. -USA Today * To save money, airlines in the United States are circulating less fresh air into the cabins of many airplanes. -The New York Times These brief essays are generally very funny, but even better, the modus operandi set him up to perpetrate a terrific hoax. In Forbes FYI, he started out a piece with a seemingly similar blurb : It has come to our attention through private channels that the Soviet government is preparing to make a very unusual, indeed unprecedented, offering : the embalmed remains of V. I. Lenin. The following fabrication proved so successful that the Soviet government was deluged with bids and Peter Jennings reported, and later angrily retracted, the story on ABC News. These and the many other pieces make for a truly funny collection. It belongs on your shelf, in the midst of the collected works of H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe, Andrew Ferguson, and P.J. O'Rourke, and the other equally funny curmudgeons who have so masterfully turned the Human Tragedy into a Human Comedy. GRADE : A-
Rating:
Summary: truly funny collection
Review: American conservatives are doomed to suffer in squaredom for a simple reason (besides weak hair): their stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval. Whatever virtues this state may possess, hipness is not one of them. Fred MacMurray may be an admirable paterfamilias and a model of bourgeois rectitude, but he will not win the dance contest on Soul Train. The Right has a serious fun problem. Like evil runes possessed of a curious power, the words carved on the id of every teenager worth her salt -- sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll -- send conservatives into a howling, medieval fury. The inconvenient fact is that all hipness contains a spice of nihilism, a tiny but flavorful soupcon of who-gives-a-****, that is anathema to the Right. To the degree that conservative writers embrace Cool Style, they simply cease to be conservative. -REVIEW : of "Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing," edited by David Brooks (GARY KAMIYA, Salon) That statement is, I suppose, fairly typical of how the Left views conservatives, and may in fact be largely true. But it misses two extremely salient points : (1) those who do embrace Cool Style cease to be humorous, after all, if you think it's perfectly fine to engage in wildly varied sexual experimentation, then 99% of the jokes ever told in the history of man, particularly those with sheep in them, no longer have punch lines; (2) no the Right isn't out having this sort of fun, we're home with our wives making jokes about the hipster doofuses that think that such behavior makes them cool. [Recall the hilarious Republican response to Ted Kennedy's 1988 Democratic convention speech, where he used the tagline "Where was George ?" Answer : Home in bed with Barbara, sober.] Humor, particularly satirical humor, by its very nature, requires you to take a pretty jaundiced view of humankind; it practically requires the stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval, which Kamiya finds so offensive. The natural result is that almost all of the humorous political writing in America today is being done by conservatives. The collection that is panned above, for instance, includes an embarrassment of riches, including Joe Queenan, PJ O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Buckley. Wry Martinis meanwhile is a collection of twenty years worth of the writings of Christopher Buckley--an editor at Forbes FYI, regular contributor to the back page of The New Yorker, former speech writer to Vice President Bush, and the son of William F. Buckley. The book contains many funny pieces ranging from travel essays to book reviews. Among the funniest are his NY Times review of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which is so scathing that it provoked a mini-feud between the two. It starts by citing Mark Twain : Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up." "Debt of Honor," the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience. And things get really ugly thereafter. One of Buckley's favorite devices, especially in his New Yorker bits, is to take one seemingly innocent item out of the news and then spin a comedic scenario around it. Among the factoids that get this treatment : * 'They both come to my house. We serve them a Martini. And we have an exchange between the two.' -Tom Brokaw in The New York Times, proposing an alternative presidential-debate format * A group of conservative political operatives is expected to announce today the launching of the Conservative TV Network, a 24-hour pay cable-television channel expected to debut in early 1996. -USA Today * To save money, airlines in the United States are circulating less fresh air into the cabins of many airplanes. -The New York Times These brief essays are generally very funny, but even better, the modus operandi set him up to perpetrate a terrific hoax. In Forbes FYI, he started out a piece with a seemingly similar blurb : It has come to our attention through private channels that the Soviet government is preparing to make a very unusual, indeed unprecedented, offering : the embalmed remains of V. I. Lenin. The following fabrication proved so successful that the Soviet government was deluged with bids and Peter Jennings reported, and later angrily retracted, the story on ABC News. These and the many other pieces make for a truly funny collection. It belongs on your shelf, in the midst of the collected works of H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe, Andrew Ferguson, and P.J. O'Rourke, and the other equally funny curmudgeons who have so masterfully turned the Human Tragedy into a Human Comedy. GRADE : A-
Rating:
Summary: Better than most books, but ho-hum for Buckley
Review: Chris Buckley is my favorite author, having written masterful satires like "Thank You for Smoking" and "Little Green Men." This is not a novel, as I was dismayed to learn, but just a collection of Buckley essays. Each is cute and funny, and the set makes for nice, lite, magazine-style reading. The essay about George Bush (Sr.) and martinis is hilarious -- I still refer to an extra-dry martini (just wave the vermouth bottle over the glass, not opening it) as the "George Bush" martini. Get this book if you have read everything else Buckley has written.
Rating:
Summary: Better than most books, but ho-hum for Buckley
Review: Chris Buckley is my favorite author, having written masterful satires like "Thank You for Smoking" and "Little Green Men." This is not a novel, as I was dismayed to learn, but just a collection of Buckley essays. Each is cute and funny, and the set makes for nice, lite, magazine-style reading. The essay about George Bush (Sr.) and martinis is hilarious -- I still refer to an extra-dry martini (just wave the vermouth bottle over the glass, not opening it) as the "George Bush" martini. Get this book if you have read everything else Buckley has written.
Rating:
Summary: Witty & Clever
Review: Christopher Buckley is without peer as a satirist but this book unfortunately includes much, much more. Buckley correctly trashes Tom Clancy but falls into the same breathless gee-whiz tone when describing his ride in an F-16 and his trip to an aircraft carrier. His essay on Yale is so full of inside jokes that if you understand it all you MUST be Skull-and-Bones. Buckley's fascination with women's fashion makes me wonder if he dresses up and struts in front of the mirror. The travel pieces are flat and make me yearn for P.J. O'Roarke. Worst of all is "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" where Buckley earnestly tries to ease his concience over Vietnam. Why can't he just thank God he didn't have to go and thank God for those who did and not bore us with the details?
Rating: 
Summary: What a weenie. . .
Review: Christopher Buckley is without peer as a satirist but this book unfortunately includes much, much more. Buckley correctly trashes Tom Clancy but falls into the same breathless gee-whiz tone when describing his ride in an F-16 and his trip to an aircraft carrier. His essay on Yale is so full of inside jokes that if you understand it all you MUST be Skull-and-Bones. Buckley's fascination with women's fashion makes me wonder if he dresses up and struts in front of the mirror. The travel pieces are flat and make me yearn for P.J. O'Roarke. Worst of all is "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" where Buckley earnestly tries to ease his concience over Vietnam. Why can't he just thank God he didn't have to go and thank God for those who did and not bore us with the details?
Rating:
Summary: Witty & Clever
Review: Fabulous! I highly recommend this collection of essays. I've read 'WET WORK' and am looking forward to reading all of his other books.
Rating:
Summary: Funny, but Thank You For Smoking is still tops
Review: Good bathroom reading
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