Why? The first three writers were men of their times - The Twentieth Century. Guinness updates the great and unending quest for truth in the fast-changing world of the Twenty-First Century, and he does so in this gentle, urgent, but unyielding call to look at life's meaning, purpose and man's final destination.

Socrates once observed that "the unexamined life is not worth living"; he was right, of course. In this slim volume, Os Guinness, a social critic who holds a doctorate from Oxford, calls us to examine our lives and join the great quest for meaning and purpose.

He writes: "The truth is that the urgent need of our times is a fresh seriousness about human existence and a renewed openness to ultimate questions."

Os Guinness sees through the lens for what passes as meaning and purpose in contemporary living. In the chasing money, power, success and the excesses in pushing moral boundaries, there is, underneath it all, the disillusioned hedonist, the bored billionaire, the despairing and suicidal, each in their own way searching for life's meaning, with most not finding it.

Guinness draws on great thinkers like Augustine, Bacon, Blake, Buddha, Siddhartha, Cervantes, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dawkins, Diderot, Donne, Goethe, Huxley, Knox, Lewis, Nietzsche, Muggeridge, Rodin, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and Solzhenitsyn, to name just a few who grappled with life's meaning and purpose.

Guinness sees through the distractions of present-day existence. He charts a course for any thinking person who is unhappy with his present beliefs and wants more, because in the end there is no more later, and death comes for us all.

Guinness understands only too well that we are each on a journey coming from different places but alerts us to the deeper reality that it is always a mistake to reduce philosophy to biography and the meaning of life to the horizon of one's own life. "The truth is that humans cannot live without meaning any more than we can live without breathing or eating."

The chapter titles are vintage Guinness, if you have dipped into his other books. An Adventure More Than an Argument; It All Begins with a Question; Jump Starting the Journey; A World of difference; Checking it Out; The Step Toward Home.

Summing up his thinking, Guinness writes, "God is present in his world, He is not silent, and we humans cannot always pretend to be deaf. In every life there are moments when the signals sound, the clues unmistakable, the experience calls out with a crystal clarity, and the restless heart is engaged and fired by true desire. What are you longing for? What do you desire? The road to faith is spurred by longing and desire, and by a thought we cannot shake off: something is being asked of us, and someone is addressing us. Faith, in essence, is our answer to God's insistent question and the fulfillment of desires and longing."

Os Guinness invites us to look at the evidence with sense of wonder. He affirms that there is a time for questions, and that following those questions can indeed lead us to answers, evidence, and commitment.

When life becomes a question, the search is on for an answer. Come, find yourself on a sure path to meaning. This book will help the earnest seeker.

I echo the word of the former editor of the LA Times Shelby Coffey, who called the book a "masterpiece". I can say no better.

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