Hard on the heels of Christopher Buckley's recent memoir of the deaths of his parents ("Losing Mum and Pup"), Richard Brookhiser has published his own account of life with William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and longtime editor of National Review, who died in February 2008.

Brookhiser is a talented and prolific writer, best known in recent years for a series of books on the founding fathers. But through much of his adult life, the center of his world was National Review. This slight but engaging memoir is the story of a young man drawn early into Buckley's orbit who struggled over many years to bask in, and at times to escape, the aura of his famous mentor.

Brookhiser grew up in a conservative but not particularly political middle-class family in a New York suburb of Rochester. When nationwide protests against the Vietnam War broke out in 1969, extending into his own small community, Brookhiser was a high school freshman. He was contemptuous of his fellow students who joined the protests.

"I thought they were wrong," he recalls. "I also thought there was something phony about the exercise, simultaneously preening and copycat." He wrote a long letter to his brother (a student at Yale) describing his reactions and, at his father's suggestion, he sent a copy to National Review, a magazine his family knew largely because they sometimes watched Buckley's television program, "Firing Line." A few months later, his precocious article appeared as the magazine's cover story the day after his 15th birthday.

Brookhiser was from the start something of a traditionalist cultural critic, a sharp-eyed commentator on mindless conformity and posturing. In 1969, for example, he seemed less interested in the war itself than in what he considered the hypocrisy and self-indulgence of the liberal bourgeoisie.

One of his first books was "The Way of the WASP," which lamented the declining influence of the traditional American elite and its replacement by what he considered a more striving, less principled group of leaders.

Brookhiser graduated from Yale in 1977 with plans to enroll at Yale Law School. Instead, he accepted an offer to spend a year at National Review and never left. In 1978, when he was 23, Buckley took him to lunch to make a startling proposal. "He had decided," Brookhiser recalls, "that I would succeed him as editor in chief of National Review, when it came time for him to retire."

In the meantime, Brookhiser would serve as senior editor, then managing editor. He loved the life of the magazine not just for its intellectual life but also for its camaraderie. His memoir is filled with affectionate profiles of his colleagues.

Nine years later, he received equally startling news, a letter from Buckley saying, "it is now plain to me ... that you are not suited to serve as editor in chief of NR after my retirement." It was a crushing blow, and Brookhiser's relationship with Buckley (and with National Review as a whole) was never the same. He ceased being a full-time employee and began the hard work of supporting himself, at least in part, as a freelance writer and occasional television pundit. He wrote for The New York Observer, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, even the occasional airline magazine.

But he never entirely broke with National Review and gradually moved back into its editorial ranks (partly because he needed the salary, but mostly because it was so hard for him to leave; he is still a senior editor). He also slowly rebuilt a complicated and slightly strained friendship with Buckley himself.

Brookhiser's story is not unlike that of many journalists and writers who have a long association with a publication, a falling out, freelancing, book writing and struggling always to make a living in an impecunious profession. In many ways, it could as easily be the story of a young man growing up at The New Republic or The Nation or Vanity Fair.

Brookhiser's memoir would be a great deal more interesting if he had used it to describe the contours of his own conservatism, his ideas, his programs, his politics. He is a person with intelligent ideas, at heart more an intellectual conservative (like many of the early writers for National Review) than a political activist, more David Brooks or even Russell Kirk than Clarence Manion or Rush Limbaugh. But Brookhiser says very little about his beliefs or on how being a conservative helped shape his life and career.

What appears to have justified this book, starting with the title, is not so much the author's own experiences as his relationship to one of the most famous and influential men of the postwar generation, a person often called the founder of the conservative movement, but one who also became a national and even global celebrity, liked and admired by people across the ideological spectrum. "When I found Bill Buckley," Brookhiser writes, "he had just reached the plateau of his career." The enfant terrible days were over, and he was entering a cooler and more self-promoting period of his life.

A few years before, Buckley had run for mayor of New York City, knowing he would lose but eager for the experience and the attention. Later, he spent almost as much time writing mystery novels and other entertainments as focusing on politics. Brookhiser's years by Buckley's side came mostly after Buckley had ceased being an important intellectual guide to conservatism or conservatives. Brookhiser was one of many people whom he drew into his world and whom he flattered, entertained and only intermittently befriended.

He engagingly describes Buckley's simultaneously generous and aloof personality, his many idiosyncracies, his enjoyment of his large and wealthy life, his preoccupation with his own fame and his attractive unpredictability in staking out positions on public issues. But in describing Buckley, as in describing himself, Brookhiser does relatively little to delineate the conservative ideas that made Buckley what he was.

Just as Buckley flitted in and out of Brookhiser's life, he flits in and out of this book. The result is that Brookhiser adds only a little more to an understanding of Buckley than he does to the history of conservatism.