If anyone ever wrote a whole book about his election as mayor of a city, the precedent has escaped this reviewer’s attention. A fortiori, he knows of no one who ever devoted 335 pages to chronicling for posterity, as William F. Buckley Jr. has done, the campaign in which he ran for mayor and lost. Buckley not only lost; he came in third. But there are many things about Buckley which are without precedent. . . .