Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

"When last we met, George Bush had just been inaugurated president, Ronald Reagan was waving goodbye to Washington in a helicopter flyby and I had just come back to New York, where I finished a book about being a speechwriter for both. Ultimately my son and I ensconced ourselves in the top of a house in one of Manhattan's old brownstone neighborhoods, where I set up shop as a writer.

"Because of...the facts of my life, I know and have dealings with many people, and am invited to visit their circles, their rings. It is a various world. "This is in part about that world. It is not a book about big events, but about the day-to-day of thinking and living in a particular era. It is not so much about politics as about life viewed from an inescapably political perspective. And if there is any revolution in it, it is one that is happening within me.".

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness begins with particulars. Life is in the details: rediscovering home after a five-year absence; learning where parenthood intersects - and sometimes clashes - with modern culture; measuring the distance between the old and the new America; deciding what one's values are and working out how to live by them within America's unruly cultural landscape.

All aspects of our life in America are ennobled through Noonan's gift of observation, for grasping that the profound resides at the heart of the mundane.

But as the details of Noonan's life accumulate, they begin to point outward, rippling beyond private interests, brushing against large questions. In "Liberty," Noonan turns to our precarious political culture, and the people who populate it. Ironically, for Noonan, liberty means both freedom from an overtly political life and immersion in it. She takes a tough look at the 1992 Bush campaign, and a hard look at the victor in that election, Bill Clinton - whom she sees as a one-term president.

Political culture is not, however, the farthest-flung colony in "The Pursuit of Happiness." From her base in America's cultural capital, New York, Noonan's musings lead her beyond the issues that concern us in the world, to those about which the new America is considerably less confident. Noonan writes of her struggles with reclaiming her faith, with finding a place for God in a country replete with the temptations of Mammon.

Throughout Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Peggy Noonan's warmth, wit and wisdom help us remember some of the things Americans know in their hearts, but often forget in their heads. Sharing in her struggles and her victories helps to put the shine back on life in America in the latter days of the twentieth century.