I have a writerly aversion to the word “rollicking.” It’s blurby and promotional and I generally keep my distance. But there are times when it’s indispensable, and the publication of L. Brent Bozell III’s startling book Stops along the Way is one of those times. Bozell, who plays a media scold on television, has written a book that despite its subtitle is neither dogmatic nor even thematic. It’s a collection of rollicking stories.

Most of the stories involve elaborate schemes cooked up by his parents — the charismatic L. Brent (Big Brent) Bozell Jr., an early editor of National Review, and the luminous Patricia Buckley (Trish) Bozell, younger sister of WFB — for the improvement of Brent III and his nine siblings. Start with schooling, and start with the boys. At first, Big Brent and Trish, finding the local public school insufficient to their academic ambitions, shipped Michael and then Brent and then Johnny off to a prep school in Pennsylvania. The curriculum was demanding, which was fine, but the bills piled up unmanageably, which was not.

Thus begins one of the ongoing tussles between the senior Bozells on the one hand and fiscal reality on the other. Big Brent and Trish were peas from similar pods. They were highly literate, they worked hard, they drank hard, they adored the kids, and they came from wealthy families. The problem was that neither one of them was capable of connecting the dots be­tween income and lifestyle.

Not to worry. Big Brent — he was six-foot-three but built in a loose and lanky way that made him seem even taller — had a scheme. He could send the boys to a good Spanish school, he announced one day, for less than half the fare in Pennsylvania. Problem solved. Michael and Brent and then Johnny were airmailed to Spain and enrolled in a tough Catholic boarding school. To ease any transitional friction, Big Brent rented an in-town apartment to which the boys could repair on weekends.

You read that right. The Bozell boys were sent to a foreign country to live on their own while being taught in a foreign language. Makes perfect sense, sí? What could possibly go wrong?

In the event, and it is a tale told lambently well, not much. The Bozell boys proved to be highly adaptable. They coped with schoolwork and made new friends. They even imported some American mischief of the teenage-boy variety. The reader gets the sense that Michael was the principal instigator of pranks involving what dull bureaucrats from the law-enforcement community might insist on calling “breaking and entering.” Michael, who later became a monk and then a priest in an ancient French order, bolsters this suspicion with a dour cover blurb: “Do not believe my brother.” Brent, for his part, seems to have fit in quickly with his in-town neighbors. He hung out with them most weekends in local bars — shooting the breeze, smoking, drinking. Brent was 14.

And so it went. Growing up Bozell involved chasing one implausible scheme after another, most of them hatched by Big Brent and all of them enforced by Trish. The gem of gems is the story of the family migration from Bethesda, Md., to Huntly, Va., in the fall of 1964. That would be less than 100 miles as the crow flies but approximately a half century as the culture evolves. Bethesda, then as now, was keeping up not only with the Joneses but with their still tonier metaphorical neighbors, the Farnsworths. The houses were stately, set back from the street by a half acre of manicured lawn and framed by designer gardens: fluffed, it seemed, for a photo shoot for a glossy shelter book. Except for one house. Less-than-stately Bozell Manor had an expansive front lawn, but it bore the scars of an all-weather football field, a scuffed badminton court, a dumping ground for bicycles, wheelbarrows, abandoned toys. When the Bozells decamped for the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, one imagines that the Farnsworths, peering through their silk curtains, did not shed hot tears.

(Disclosure. I knew the house well. Earlier that year I had managed Big Brent’s campaign for Congress and was a frequent guest for breakfast. My notes from April 1964 explain: “Trish Bozell has taken pity on me. She has noticed — how could she not? — that I have packed 25 pounds on my formerly skinny frame. I have done so by observing the Official Mayo Clinic Campaign Worker’s Diet, which calls for five meals a day, each of them consisting of a large pizza, extra cheese, washed down by a sugar drink in the extra-gulp size. Trish insists I join the kids for breakfast, where she introduces me to toast, coffee, and something she calls fruit.”)

The proximate cause of the move to Nowheresville, though tricked out by Big Brent in bracing God-and-country rhetoric, was fiscal. Keeping up with the Farnsworths and their fix-and-favor incomes was not easy. But Big Brent, the reader will not be surprised to learn, had a scheme. The family could live twice as well at half the price, he announced, by moving to a grand old house out near the West Virginia border.

The kids loved the place. It had eight bedrooms on the first floor. Tunnels for exploring. A ballroom complete with orchestra loft. (You never knew in Bozell World when you might want to throw a fancy-dress ball at the end of a long unpaved road.) Forty-eight acres of verdant fields on a more-or-less working farm. Lots of outbuildings, one of which came with its own black family in residence. (I know, I know. Don’t bother calling the Woke Police. It was, apparently, a rural-Virginia thing.) Stirred by memories from his own days in Spain, Big Brent tried to re-create the enchanting sound of grazing sheep tinkling their neck-bells. He bought a small herd and set them loose on the rolling hills of his new estate. His lack of preparation for sheep farming was soon revealed. The sheep were set upon by predators and the tinkling bells were stilled. All of them.

For a time, Big Brent loved the prop­erty, too. He tacked up a sign declaring that it would now be known as Monte­jurra, after a town in Navarre that has been the spiritual capital of the Carlist movement for more than a century and is best known today for the massacre of party members suspected of ideological delinquency. An odd choice, some thought, for a Catholic family recently arrived in the Bible Belt. (Some good ol’ boys seemed to agree. One night they burned a big ol’ cross in the front yard.)

Hindsight would see clearly that the move to Montejurra would be the last of Big Brent’s Excellent Adventures. With admirable economy and heartbreaking restraint, Brent nails the inflection point: “His [Big Brent’s] behavior was becoming ever more erratic. . . . In time his conduct would become so irrational as to require hospitalization. We would learn he was suffering from manic depression, now known more kindly as bipolar disorder. For the next quarter century he’d struggle with this horrific illness, enduring enough physical and mental torture to make you weep.” Yes. All of us who loved Big Brent wept.

Many readers will relish this book and say, “I want more stories, Mr. Bozell. Please write another book.” Not me. I want two more books. I want, first, a collection of letters written by Big Brent and Trish. They were epistolary artists of the first rank. My wife, Jane, keeps one from Trish, written before they met. While the Freemans were no slouches in the letter-writing department, I concede the point that Trish welcomed Jane to the extended Bozell family more warmly than anybody welcomed Jane to my family. And Big Brent had a knack for dispatching an attaboy at exactly the moment you needed it. I forget which shoelace I had just tripped over, but I was in the dumps, registering somewhere on the self-esteem spectrum between Low and Worthless, when he wrote to tell me that, with the kind of man I was becoming, “our enemies will fear you.” He may have overshot that runway a tad: I could never strike fear in the hearts of my own misbehaving children. But the generality survives that Big Brent was always there, and all the way there, for his friends.

The other book I want is more substantive. It would make the case that has never been made comprehensively: namely, that Brent Bozell Jr. was the single most consequential figure in the post-war revival of political conservatism. That case would rest on a remarkable burst of activity during his thirties and forties. He became a principal adviser to Joseph McCarthy and, in the opinion of close observers, salvaged the anti-Communist cause from the senator’s excesses. He ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative, which gave Barry Goldwater a national persona and laid the foundation for his presidential candidacy. In 1970, he organized and led the first major pro-life march in the country, galvanizing a national movement in opposition to abortion. First in legal circles and then in a book for general readership, he limned the arguments against judicial overreach and legislating from the bench now regarded as foundational to conservative jurisprudence. He championed “virtue,” over against “freedom,” and became one of the fathers of the fusionist conservatism of his day and the national conservatism of this day.

Who, Big Brent’s admirers will ask, was more consequential?