Books, Arts & Manners: Such, Such Were the Joys

The Joys of National Review, 1955 to 1980, compiled by Priscilla L. Buckley (National Review Books, 270 pp., $25)

THIS long-needed anthology tells one story and implies another. The first is of The Little Magazine That Did. The second is of all the people who read it, and what happened to them. Both are now a part of American history, though only one has been put on paper. Still, the first story is remarkable enough in its own right, and Priscilla Buckley tells it with put-outmore-flags panache both in her own introduction (whose only fault is that it does not so much as hint at the importance of the wonderful woman who wrote it) and in the 100,000-odd words she has chosen to represent the first 25 years of NR.