As a British soldier who fought against Napoleon, William Buckley served capably and truly but a drunken escapade led to his transportation to a short-lived settlement in Australia, and once there to his daring escape from custody and thirty years of isolation among the First People of the region, who saved and sheltered him. Known to his saviours as 'Murrangurk', Buckley learnt their language and forgot his own. He lived as they did and would later record - invaluably for us today - his understanding of their customs and traditions. When eventually Europeans returned and conflict between them and the First People flared, Buckley was at the heart of the tumult. He courageously stopped three massacres, but soon found himself disregarded by the antagonists and dangerously compromised.

‘Flannery has done us a service first by reissuing the story of a fascinating adventure from 200 years ago, and then by setting these events in perspective with his lucid introduction.’ Canberra Times ‘At 2.00 pm on Sunday, 6 July 1835, a giant of a man shambled into the camp left by John Batman at Indented Head near Geelong...’ In 1803 the convict William Buckley, a former soldier, escaped from the first official settlement in Victoria, near Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay. For three decades the ‘wild white man’ lived with Aborigines around the bay, before giving himself up in 1835. First published in 1852, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is the ultimate survival story of early Australia and provides an extraordinary insight into pre-contact indigenous society. Tim Flannery has published over thirty books, including the award-winning The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers and Here on Earth and the novel The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish. In 2005 he was named Australian Humanist of the Year and in 2007 Australian of the Year. In 2007 he co-founded and was appointed Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. In 2011 he became Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, and in 2013 he founded the Australian Climate Council. ‘This account, in Buckley’s words...has all the elements of a Boy’s Own yarn: convicts, savages, privations, wars, cannibalism, survival, treachery and the founding of a colony.’ Herald Sun

A biography of William F. Buckley who founded modern American conservatism, started The National Review, and influenced a generation of politicians.

A new understanding of the man who changed the face of American politics William F. Buckley Jr. is widely regarded as the most influential American conservative writer, activist, and organizer in the postwar era. In this nuanced biography, Alvin Felzenberg sheds light on little-known aspects of Buckley’s career, including his role as back-channel adviser to policy makers, his intimate friendship with both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, his changing views on civil rights, and his break with George W. Bush over the Iraq War. Felzenberg demonstrates how Buckley conveyed his message across multiple platforms and drew upon his vast network of contacts, his personal charm, his extraordinary wit, and his celebrity status to move the center of political gravity in the United States closer to his point of view. Including many rarely seen photographs, this account of one of the most compelling personalities of American politics will appeal to conservatives, liberals, and even the apolitical.

“This is an insightful book that will please anyone interested in midcentury American history and politics. Anyone serious about political philosophy will learn from it. Highly recommended.” -Library Journal (starred review) William F. Buckley Jr. was the foremost architect of the conservative movement that transformed American politics between the 1960s and the end of the century. When Buckley launched National Review in 1955, conservatism was a beleaguered, fringe segment of the Republican Party. Three decades later Ronald Reagan-who credited National Review with shaping his beliefs-was in the White House. Buckley and his allies devised a new-model conservatism that replaced traditional ideals of Edmund Burke with a passionate belief in the free market; religious faith; and an aggressive stance on foreign policy. Buckley's TV show, Firing Line, and his campaign for mayor of New York City made him a celebrity; his wit and zest for combat made conservatism fun. But Buckley was far more than a controversialist. Deploying his uncommon charm, shrewdly recruiting allies, quashing ideological competitors, and refusing to compromise on core principles, he almost single-handedly transformed conservatism from a set of retrograde attitudes into a revolutionary force.

His Roman-Catholic faith has been an enduring part of the life and personality of William Buckley, Jr. Now, for the first time since his ground breaking God and the Man at Yale he has written a book about faith--his own. Nearer, My God, An Autobiography of Faith is William Buckley's superbly written story of his life seen through his abiding love for the Catholic Church, a love instilled in him from childhood. He reminisces about his school days in England, his family, the affect the Lunn/Knox dialogue had on him, and examines many aspects of Catholicism and its theology, doctrine and liturgy and on the way discourses about Lourdes, the vernacular mass, the Church and the State, the Crucifixion, the priesthood, contraception as well as the many people who have assisted him on his life's journey. A remarkable, revealing book about one man and his faith.

The modern-day Renaissance man who forged the conservative movement Noted conservative historian Lee Edwards, who knew William F. Buckley Jr. for more than forty years, delivers a much-needed intellectual biography of the man has been called “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.” In this concise and compelling book, Edwards reveals how Buckley did more than any other person to build the conservative movement. Once derided as a set of “irritable mental gestures,” conservatism became, under Buckley’s guidance, a political and intellectual force that transformed America. As conservatives debate the ideas that should drive their movement, William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement reminds us of the principles that animated Buckley, as well as the thinkers who inspired him. The four most important intellectual influences on this great molder of American conservatism, Edwards shows, were libertarian author and social critic Albert Jay Nock, conservative political scientist Willmoore Kendall, former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, and realpolitik apostle James Burnham. Having dug deep into the voluminous Buckley papers, Edwards also illuminates the profound influence of Buckley’s close-knit family and his unwavering Catholic faith.

"The fifteen interviews in this collection are reprinted as they appeared originally ..."--Introduction.

Richard Brookhiser wrote his first cover story for National Review at age fourteen, and became the magazine's youngest senior editor at twenty-three. William F. Buckley Jr. was Brookhiser's mentor, hero, and admirer; within a year of Brookhiser's arrival at the magazine, Buckley tapped him as his successor as editor-in-chief. But without warning, the relation ship soured -- one day, Brookhiser returned to his desk to find a letter from Buckley unceremoniously informing him "you will no longer be my successor." Brookhiser remained friends and colleagues with Buckley despite the breach, and in Right Time, Right Place he tells the story of that friendship with affection and clarity. At the same time, he provides a delightful account of the intellectual and political ferment of the conservative resurgence that Buckley nurtured and led. Witty and poignant, Right Time, Right Place tells the story of a young man and a political movement coming of age -- and of the man who inspired them both.

"For God, for country, and for Yale... in that order," William F. Buckley Jr. wrote as the dedication of his monumental work—a compendium of knowledge that still resonates within the halls of the Ivy League university that tried to cover up its political and religious bias. In 1951, a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate published his first book, which exposed the "extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude" that prevailed at his alma mater. The book, God and Man at Yale, rocked the academic world and catapulted its young author, William F. Buckley Jr. into the public spotlight. Now, half a century later, read the extraordinary work that began the modern conservative movement. Buckley's harsh assessment of his alma mater divulged the reality behind the institution's wholly secular education, even within the religion department and divinity school. Unabashed, one former Yale student details the importance of Christianity and heralds the modern conservative movement in his preeminent tell-all, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom."