Live life slowly. That will make it last longer.

Of all the tips about living a good life offered by author Dick Sonnichsen in Adventures in Good Living, that may be what our world needs to hear most in these crazy times. In his eighth decade and fifth book of social commentary, Sonnichsen makes an inclusive and incisive assessment of the state of the planet — the United States in particular — and presents a broad array of ideas to help make life more meaningful.

On the angsty side of life, Sonnichsen addresses global warming, partisan pettiness and erroneous ideologies in modern politics, poverty, income inequality and accumulation of wealth by the few, race relations, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rabbit hole of the world wide web, a technology that should unite us but often serves to isolate us further from our fellow humans and the natural world. He urges individuals to take immediate action to begin solving these concerns in the greater world as well as their personal lives.

On the lighter side, he also discusses a diverse range of comforts, from food to drink to sex to the joy of hiking and the blessings of relationship with friends, family and spouse. It’s not all bad news, after all.

He returns also to a subject addressed in previous books (a list of his others is found inside), the efficacy (or lack thereof) of organized religion. Evolution, he believes, offers a much more believable and provable version of how we and all of our fellow creatures (including all those bugs!) came to be.

Sonnichsen’s sources for Adventures in Good Living range from the ancient Greeks through Darwin and Thoreau to Rachel Carson and A.C. Grayling. The bottom line of his shared thoughts is that each individual has the capacity to live a good life, but it is each individual’s responsibility to take action to achieve it.

Don’t let your life happen by accident. In a world full of problems and the worries that accompany them, there is much to be learned here.

Blue Creek Press provided editing and interior design for this book. It is available on Amazon.