Specters as various as Vallejo, Szymborska, Neruda, Fidel Castro, and Groucho Marx guide and support the elegies in Christopher Buckley's new collection. A god that may or may not be there as well as politics, memory, history, popular culture, philosophy, and a good deal of arm wrestling with chance inform Buckley's on-going debate between faith and doubt, science and religion. Buckley brings his customary sense of irony and slant humor to bear on the deep inquiry into our collective fates in Agnostic.