All the virtues of Bill Buckley's earlier books are here but this one is profoundly different. The is completed (perhaps) the end of several affairs and the capstone volume of a diarist-journal keeper-journalist, who has proved to be, over books at sea and on land (Cruising Speed, The Unmaking of a Mayor, Airborne, Atlantic High, Overdrive, Racing Through Paradise), both his own Boswell and Johnson.