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Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley Jr.
Well known as a political commentator and the author of sixteen novels, William F. Buckley Jr. was also a superb chronicler of travel. Getting About gathers more than one hundred of his articles about journeys by boat, train, or plane, representing a lifetime of adventure around the world—from Annapolis to Zurich, from the Azores to the Virgin Islands.
An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing. He took first place in the Magazine Article on Foreign Travel category in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for eight pieces written while “Concording around the world” in 1989. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining pieces full of exuberance and authority. Being a Bach afficionado, he composed his sentences for a well-tuned ear.
Buckley’s talent for arranging a mise-en-scène stands out in accounts of riding the Orient Express, skiing at Alta, or vacationing at Barbuda. Though himself a central character in the story, he never dominates it. He wrote candidly about travel misadventures, as when his sixty-foot schooner broke down in the Bahamas and was towed to Miami by a Coast Guard cutter, or when a malfunctioning compass landed his boat on a rocky shoal off Rhode Island and the Coast Guard said, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” He also took a gimlet eye to the travel industry and a discriminating palate to airline food, suggesting that airports sell “a really good box lunch” with celery rémoulade, fresh figs, and a nice Bordeaux.
Getting About is pure enjoyment, but it also broadens the significance of Buckley’s œuvre. Along with Bill Meehan’s illuminating introduction, this delightful collection helps preserve Buckley’s legacy as his centenary, in 2025, approaches.
An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing. He took first place in the Magazine Article on Foreign Travel category in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for eight pieces written while “Concording around the world” in 1989. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining pieces full of exuberance and authority. Being a Bach afficionado, he composed his sentences for a well-tuned ear.
Buckley’s talent for arranging a mise-en-scène stands out in accounts of riding the Orient Express, skiing at Alta, or vacationing at Barbuda. Though himself a central character in the story, he never dominates it. He wrote candidly about travel misadventures, as when his sixty-foot schooner broke down in the Bahamas and was towed to Miami by a Coast Guard cutter, or when a malfunctioning compass landed his boat on a rocky shoal off Rhode Island and the Coast Guard said, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” He also took a gimlet eye to the travel industry and a discriminating palate to airline food, suggesting that airports sell “a really good box lunch” with celery rémoulade, fresh figs, and a nice Bordeaux.
Getting About is pure enjoyment, but it also broadens the significance of Buckley’s œuvre. Along with Bill Meehan’s illuminating introduction, this delightful collection helps preserve Buckley’s legacy as his centenary, in 2025, approaches.
- GenresTravelNonfiction
455 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 18, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 8, 2023
It’s always a pleasure to read WFB’s travel writing - I loved Airborne and Atlantic High - for the wit and warmth, and the highlights for me were the sailing stories. I would have given this 4 Stars - but I’ll reserve that for the second edition when Mr Meehan has corrected the myriad typos and misspellings in this first edition, which must have the wordsmith WFB rolling in his grave. How many typos? More than I’ve ever noticed in a book. Otherwise, like a box of chocolates…
July 20, 2023
It’s been years since I’ve read a William F. Buckley book. This is a collection of his travel writings originally published in various outlets, from 1958 to 2004 (WFB passed away in 2008). It reminded me how enjoyable he is to read, such as this: “I forget why I insist on carrying a compass, but I do, and would know sooner than anyone else if a hijacker had got hold of the controls and was heading toward Cuba while the passengers thought ourselves heading serenely toward Minneapolis.” He vacationed in Gstaad, Switzerland for decades, usually writing a book while there. I love how he sums up the politics of the country:
“The first few winters, at age five or six, I would amuse myself by asking any old Swiss, any old time, “Excuse me, but could you please tell me the name of the president of Switzerland?” The record, thus far, is 100 percent: nobody has known the name of the president of Switzerland. Switzerland is so well governed, the responsibilities are so diffused, the national sense of purpose is so explicit, that there simply isn’t very much left over for the President to do. It is a most glorious country and, after my own, I love it best…”
And this from 1973, a timeless argument against the Kabuki theater that is the TSA:
“…skyjacking has been done with no more weapon than a Coca-Cola bottle full of colored water, and once with nothing more than a briefcase full of books and with a string hanging out.” …factor of human inconvenience and humiliation, combined with the statistics, would appear thoroughly to discredit the personal search. danger is precisely that the bureaucratic mind should fall into the habit of personal search without a sensible justification for it.
He wrote a lot of articles on the travails of airline travel, and the ones from the 1970s before deregulation showcase another world entirely—when airfares and even overweight baggage prices were regulated. He documents the many sailing trips he took in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with the Azores (“I deem them the most beautiful islands in the world”) and French Polynesia islands (and why it is not “the Caribbean” of California) being among his favorite places. The French held on to the latter islands to test its nuclear weapons. He flew the Concorde around the world in 1989 (NY, Acapulco, San Francisco, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, Sydney, Perth, Sri Lanka, Cape Town, London), and those were fascinating trips documented here. Even his favorite NY restaurant, Paone’s at 207 East Thirty-Fourth Street gets a review. There’s a couple of articles on his annual pilgrimage to Alta, Utah (which can get 800 inches of snow in a heavy year, 500 inches average year) for skiing, along with Milton Friedman. His trip down to the Titanic, which he did in 1987, and only about 150 men and women in the world had dived as deep in the water up to that point, was a pleasure to read, including this fact that I was not aware of:
“Captain Stanley Lord of the nearby California chose to ignore eight distress flares on the extraordinary grounds (a judgment he reached from his cabin, half asleep) that the color of the sighted flares probably meant that they had been touched off as a sort of celebratory handshake in midocean, a merchant vessel spotting another from the same line somewhere in the distance. Captain Lord turned over and went back to sleep in his immobilized liner (he had ordered the engines stopped because of ice conditions).”
He got the invitation after he responded to Senator Lowell P. Weicker’s (CT) introducing a bill that would prohibit the import of any artifacts from the Titanic for commercial gain. Buckley responded:
“…you hardly consecrate the artifacts that went down on the Titanic by leaving them on the ocean floor. The second is a libertarian point. I do not understand where Congress got the idea that it has any business telling an adult American what he can and what he cannot purchase from a willing seller, if you’re not talking drugs or machine guns. I mean, who told Congress it could come between me and the Titanic, which lies in international waters and is no one’s property?”
He also wrote: “I did not feel any kinship to the voyeur; no more than when, a year earlier, I ogled the tombs in the Nile or, a dozen years ago, the catacombs in Lima beneath the great cathedral where the bones of thousands of Incas lie.”
See the world through the eyes of one the country’s most famous “journalists.” Where else would you learn: “…the reason different countries have different gauges is to discourage invasion. (When the Spaniards set out to rebuild their railroad system they intentionally selected a different gauge from the French, to guard against another Napoleon.)” You won’t be disappointed.
“The first few winters, at age five or six, I would amuse myself by asking any old Swiss, any old time, “Excuse me, but could you please tell me the name of the president of Switzerland?” The record, thus far, is 100 percent: nobody has known the name of the president of Switzerland. Switzerland is so well governed, the responsibilities are so diffused, the national sense of purpose is so explicit, that there simply isn’t very much left over for the President to do. It is a most glorious country and, after my own, I love it best…”
And this from 1973, a timeless argument against the Kabuki theater that is the TSA:
“…skyjacking has been done with no more weapon than a Coca-Cola bottle full of colored water, and once with nothing more than a briefcase full of books and with a string hanging out.” …factor of human inconvenience and humiliation, combined with the statistics, would appear thoroughly to discredit the personal search. danger is precisely that the bureaucratic mind should fall into the habit of personal search without a sensible justification for it.
He wrote a lot of articles on the travails of airline travel, and the ones from the 1970s before deregulation showcase another world entirely—when airfares and even overweight baggage prices were regulated. He documents the many sailing trips he took in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with the Azores (“I deem them the most beautiful islands in the world”) and French Polynesia islands (and why it is not “the Caribbean” of California) being among his favorite places. The French held on to the latter islands to test its nuclear weapons. He flew the Concorde around the world in 1989 (NY, Acapulco, San Francisco, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, Sydney, Perth, Sri Lanka, Cape Town, London), and those were fascinating trips documented here. Even his favorite NY restaurant, Paone’s at 207 East Thirty-Fourth Street gets a review. There’s a couple of articles on his annual pilgrimage to Alta, Utah (which can get 800 inches of snow in a heavy year, 500 inches average year) for skiing, along with Milton Friedman. His trip down to the Titanic, which he did in 1987, and only about 150 men and women in the world had dived as deep in the water up to that point, was a pleasure to read, including this fact that I was not aware of:
“Captain Stanley Lord of the nearby California chose to ignore eight distress flares on the extraordinary grounds (a judgment he reached from his cabin, half asleep) that the color of the sighted flares probably meant that they had been touched off as a sort of celebratory handshake in midocean, a merchant vessel spotting another from the same line somewhere in the distance. Captain Lord turned over and went back to sleep in his immobilized liner (he had ordered the engines stopped because of ice conditions).”
He got the invitation after he responded to Senator Lowell P. Weicker’s (CT) introducing a bill that would prohibit the import of any artifacts from the Titanic for commercial gain. Buckley responded:
“…you hardly consecrate the artifacts that went down on the Titanic by leaving them on the ocean floor. The second is a libertarian point. I do not understand where Congress got the idea that it has any business telling an adult American what he can and what he cannot purchase from a willing seller, if you’re not talking drugs or machine guns. I mean, who told Congress it could come between me and the Titanic, which lies in international waters and is no one’s property?”
He also wrote: “I did not feel any kinship to the voyeur; no more than when, a year earlier, I ogled the tombs in the Nile or, a dozen years ago, the catacombs in Lima beneath the great cathedral where the bones of thousands of Incas lie.”
See the world through the eyes of one the country’s most famous “journalists.” Where else would you learn: “…the reason different countries have different gauges is to discourage invasion. (When the Spaniards set out to rebuild their railroad system they intentionally selected a different gauge from the French, to guard against another Napoleon.)” You won’t be disappointed.
August 2, 2024
This is a book that has many strengths and just as many weaknesses. At the end of the day, your appreciation for the book will largely depend on your view of Buckley. It won’t convert anyone, but long time fans will find much to like. Those who go below the surface will find areas of real concern.
The introductions to his books were always highlights. Buckley cultivated and appreciated good writing. Buckley would have hated the introduction to this book; it is boring as hell.
The book is a time capsule of sorts; it’s kind of shocking to read a passionate column defending smoking on a plane. The prices quoted will have you shaking your head. The changes in air travel really show what it was and what it has become.
The paradox of Buckley was that he was the most entitled whiny bitch who ever lived but somehow made it endearing and engaging. I found myself often disgusted but often entertained.
The highlight were the sailing articles. He loved sailing and it comes through.
Nobody that was as prolific as Buckley could avoid being wrong at times, and boy howdy he was wrong a lot. Examples? Perhaps referring to native Americans as savages didn’t age well. There are many many examples of so much more.
At the end, it’s worth the read. Don’t be surprised about the mixed feelings this book will leave you with.
The introductions to his books were always highlights. Buckley cultivated and appreciated good writing. Buckley would have hated the introduction to this book; it is boring as hell.
The book is a time capsule of sorts; it’s kind of shocking to read a passionate column defending smoking on a plane. The prices quoted will have you shaking your head. The changes in air travel really show what it was and what it has become.
The paradox of Buckley was that he was the most entitled whiny bitch who ever lived but somehow made it endearing and engaging. I found myself often disgusted but often entertained.
The highlight were the sailing articles. He loved sailing and it comes through.
Nobody that was as prolific as Buckley could avoid being wrong at times, and boy howdy he was wrong a lot. Examples? Perhaps referring to native Americans as savages didn’t age well. There are many many examples of so much more.
At the end, it’s worth the read. Don’t be surprised about the mixed feelings this book will leave you with.
May 14, 2024
In writing a review about Henry James travelogues, Buckley says the only person who will read them all the way through is "an Eagle Scout in graduate school." The same could be said of this volume. In theory, this book should be right in my wheelhouse - I like Bill Buckley, I enjoy sailing, and I fly a lot. But the way this book is organized, you get a lot of sailing columns in a row that start to sound remarkably similar, and the same goes with pieces about hotels, airlines, etc. While still enjoyable, you could probably cut a hundred columns out of this tome and better distill the wit and wisdom of Buckley instead of trying to collect everything he wrote.
December 20, 2023
A wonderful collection of essays by a wonderful writer, and person.
August 3, 2023
The late William F. Buckley, Jr is best remembered for having been a primary founder of the modern American conservative political movement. As candidate for mayor of New York City he lost, but his campaign and movement effectively ended the political career of liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay, once considered presidential material, and firmly aligned the Republican party with conservatism. But Buckly was also one of the greatest American writers of the second half of the 20th century. He was incredibly educated, cultured, and philosophical and despite being old money wealthy and patrician, he did not talk down to anyone and as you read his words or listened to his speeches, you always felt like the man and you were level. He also had a knack, completely forsaken by modern simplistic writers, to use uncommon and sophisticated words that most people would need a dictionary to refer to, but he used these words not to show off, but because they turned out to be the most perfect word for the sentence he crafted. And today with a dictionary app available at your fingertips with your smartphone, reading Buckley is an educating delight.
Now many people may not agree with conservative politics. That's what makes this book special. There is little to no politics in this collection of essays. Buckley was a great traveler, and he wrote as much travel writings as political columns and this is a collection of his travel writings across decades. Buckley was an open water sailor and even though he mentioning of buying and chartering expensive boats may be foreign to most of us, his travel adventures are enthralling. He was also a great flyer, and his warnings on commercial airlines have come sadly true-- airlines even in his time were making seats and legroom smaller and smaller and quality service steadily deteriorated. He had some good policy ideas to combat this trend and we all would have been better off to listen to his warnings on airlines.
Buckley was very old money, very cultured, very educated and his world is not the world most of us will ever live in. No we don't buy sailing yachts, we don't all revel in classical music and art, most of us don't have many wealthy, Nobel-prize winning cultured friends, but Buckley writes about his world in a way we all can appreciate, understand and not feel put down by and he provides great insight into all the cultures and countries and places he visits whether by air or sea.
A few parts of this book are dated. Buckley defends smoking and not exercising much, views that don't have much support today but they do provide an insight into the history and culture of the 1960s and 1970s in this regard.
If you want to understand or debate Buckley's conservative politics, this is not right book of his writings for you. But if you want to enjoy a great book of travel tales to read over a nice summer vacation, while learning some great new fascinating words and getting a real inside view of old money elites, this book is simply a masterpiece. I was sorry to see it end. The perfect summer read!
Now many people may not agree with conservative politics. That's what makes this book special. There is little to no politics in this collection of essays. Buckley was a great traveler, and he wrote as much travel writings as political columns and this is a collection of his travel writings across decades. Buckley was an open water sailor and even though he mentioning of buying and chartering expensive boats may be foreign to most of us, his travel adventures are enthralling. He was also a great flyer, and his warnings on commercial airlines have come sadly true-- airlines even in his time were making seats and legroom smaller and smaller and quality service steadily deteriorated. He had some good policy ideas to combat this trend and we all would have been better off to listen to his warnings on airlines.
Buckley was very old money, very cultured, very educated and his world is not the world most of us will ever live in. No we don't buy sailing yachts, we don't all revel in classical music and art, most of us don't have many wealthy, Nobel-prize winning cultured friends, but Buckley writes about his world in a way we all can appreciate, understand and not feel put down by and he provides great insight into all the cultures and countries and places he visits whether by air or sea.
A few parts of this book are dated. Buckley defends smoking and not exercising much, views that don't have much support today but they do provide an insight into the history and culture of the 1960s and 1970s in this regard.
If you want to understand or debate Buckley's conservative politics, this is not right book of his writings for you. But if you want to enjoy a great book of travel tales to read over a nice summer vacation, while learning some great new fascinating words and getting a real inside view of old money elites, this book is simply a masterpiece. I was sorry to see it end. The perfect summer read!
December 16, 2023
I learned more about sailing than I ever needed to know while reading this delightfully amusing collection of articles by the one-of-a-kind writer, William F Buckley.
As a young adult I never missed Firing Line. I learned words I never knew existed. I sat with a dictionary at my side. My IQ edged up with every episode. I learned how to think for the first time in spite of all the wonderful teachers I'd been lucky to have had while in school.
I was inspired to write by WFB, but I'd never dare to think my books were near his level. Some thought he was an arrogant elitist, but there's no way to hide that level of intelligence, and he never felt the need to talk down.
A very worthy read.
As a young adult I never missed Firing Line. I learned words I never knew existed. I sat with a dictionary at my side. My IQ edged up with every episode. I learned how to think for the first time in spite of all the wonderful teachers I'd been lucky to have had while in school.
I was inspired to write by WFB, but I'd never dare to think my books were near his level. Some thought he was an arrogant elitist, but there's no way to hide that level of intelligence, and he never felt the need to talk down.
A very worthy read.
July 10, 2023
Love his politics or hate his politics; few could write as well and as entertainingly as Buckley. This wonderful anthology brings him back to life with commentary on travel as spot in today as when written 30 years ago. For the sailor in the family it offers some of the best reflections from his 4 books detailng his sailing trips. Few can match his mastery of the English language and ability to entertain.
August 29, 2024
I got about halfway through and, in a rare decision, had to stop reading. Buckley is a fantastic writer, and I suspect if I were loved sailboats I would have enjoyed this more. But after 400 pages of reading one story after another of him sailing to and fro, with the occasional witticism about airplane travel thrown in, I just decided there was no way I could do another 4 hours of it.
September 27, 2025
I've never been on a sail boat and the longest boat trip I've ever taken is the Fishers Island Ferry but I have always loved Buckley's books about sailing. This book offers more of the kind mixed with his other travel writing.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews