‘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

Book review.

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.

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.

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.

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 New York Times Bestseller William F. Buckley, Jr. remembers—as only he could—the towering figures of the twentieth century in a brilliant and emotionally powerful collection, compiled by acclaimed Fox News correspondent James Rosen. In a half century on the national stage, William F. Buckley, Jr. achieved unique stature as a writer, a celebrity, and the undisputed godfather of modern American conservatism. He kept company with the best and brightest, the sultry and powerful. Ronald Reagan pronounced WFB “perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era,” and his jet-setting life was a who’s who of high society, fame, and fortune. Among all his distinctions, which include founding the conservative magazine National Review and hosting the long-running talk show Firing Line, Buckley was also a master of that most elusive art form: the eulogy. He drew on his unrivaled gifts to mourn, celebrate, or seek mercy for the men and women who touched his life and the nation. Now, for the first time, WFB’s sweeping judgments of the great figures of his time—presidents and prime ministers, celebrities and scoundrels, intellectuals and guitar gods—are collected in one place. A Torch Kept Lit presents more than fifty of Buckley’s best eulogies, drawing on his personal memories and private correspondences and using a novelist’s touch to conjure his subjects as he knew them. We are reintroduced, through Buckley’s eyes, to the likes of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, Elvis Presley and John Lennon, Truman Capote and Martin Luther King, Jr. Curated by Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, a Buckley protégé and frequent contributor to National Review, this volumes sheds light on a tumultuous period in American history—from World War II to Watergate, the “death” of God to the Grateful Dead—as told in the inimitable voice of one of our most elegant literary stylists.William F. Buckley, Jr. is back—just when we need him most.