The Pursuit of Loneliness is a thundering critique of the unexamined North American lifestyle. It calls to us from the turbulent 60s with a message as relevant today as it was then. Written when the major US foreign war of occupation targeted Vietnam and the major domestic battle was with students, the names have changed but the battle lines are strikingly similar today.

Today there is so much cultural revisionism and retooling of the facts surrounding the clash between the predominating mainstream material culture and the youthful counterculture that one often mutters in disgust at the kind of garish, superficial nonsense being promulgated by the popular media to the effect that the sixties generation was just about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Just fun and games, folks; nothing but fun and games. There is hardly a mention of the very serious, well-thought-through criticisms of materialism, racism, and greed that were so essential to the beginning of the conflict in the sixties. While no one who was there will deny each of these elements (the media's holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock & roll) contributed to the general cultural atmosphere of openness and emotional experimentation and intoxication, it can hardly be truthfully described so simply or in such reductionist terms.