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A review by thepermageek
Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude by Emily White
3.0
On the whole I really enjoyed the book, especially the style...I feel like it struck such a nice balance between memoir and psychological/social science nerd-ery! The one minor critique I have about it is that, from the vantage point of nearly a decade after Lonely was published, some of the arguments about the dearth of loneliness as a topic in research, clinical psychology, and broader social/cultural contexts, doesn't quite hold up.
As that point got repeated over and over in the book I found I had to constantly remind myself that Lonely was published (2010):
1) *before* Susan Pinker's "The Village Effect," Matthew Lieberman's "Social," Johann Hari's "Lost Connections," Brene Brown's "Braving The Wilderness" and tons of other books detailing how extremely vital face-to-face feelings of belonging & connection are to human beings,
2) *before* the U.K. parliament appointed Tracey Crouch as the first ever "Minister of Loneliness"
3) *before* Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, announced that the loneliness epidemic was the #1 public health crisis in America.
tl;dr
Lonely is a phenomenal read...especially when context is taken into consideration!
As that point got repeated over and over in the book I found I had to constantly remind myself that Lonely was published (2010):
1) *before* Susan Pinker's "The Village Effect," Matthew Lieberman's "Social," Johann Hari's "Lost Connections," Brene Brown's "Braving The Wilderness" and tons of other books detailing how extremely vital face-to-face feelings of belonging & connection are to human beings,
2) *before* the U.K. parliament appointed Tracey Crouch as the first ever "Minister of Loneliness"
3) *before* Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, announced that the loneliness epidemic was the #1 public health crisis in America.
tl;dr
Lonely is a phenomenal read...especially when context is taken into consideration!