Life, Liberty and the Pursuit: One Personal Adventure per Year from the Bicentennial to the 250th Book One: The End: One Personal Adventure per Year f - Paperback

by Burgess Shale (Author)

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit is a candid literary memoir that distills over 50 years and roughly 35,000 journal pages into One Personal Adventure per Year from the Bicentennial to the 250th.

Spiced with offbeat insights and dark humor that courses from dry to raw to tragicomic, each chapter explores how people use whatever freedom they believe they have.

In the first chapter, author Burgess Shale is a wide-eyed college kid reporting police brutality to a police officer who laughs at him. By the third chapter, Shale has fully internalized the disenchantment of the 1970s. He drops out of everything, seeking escape from societal contradiction and dysfunction, only to find the same problems alive and kicking within himself. After devoting the end of the '70s to being drunk and disorderly, Shale attains sobriety. Hoping that he will now find a way to fit in, he discovers that his world is at least as dysfunctional as it was when he tried to escape it.

As the chapters jump from year to year, the characters try to adjust to a world that itself keeps trying to adjust. The book follows a parade of often eccentric characters who sometimes change their lives but rarely change who they are.

Book One: The End covers the last quarter of the 20th century, from 1976-1999. Book Two, which covers the first quarter of the 21st century, is planned for fall 2026.