Reviews
Mr. Keyes regards this book as comprising "optimistic comments on marriage and community." His view is too modest. It is actually a series of unusually perceptive and entertaining chapters on the cultural and emotional phenomena of our time, from shopping centers and Holiday Inns to survival in an urban environment. The unifying factor among these diverse elements is the author's concern with the importance of community, with the sense of "belonging" -- its loss in contemporary society, and the means by which it can be regained. The latter really boils down to one word, love -- a cliche which Keyes manages to infuse with new life simply by being so all-fired enthusiastic about man's need for it and so down-to-earth about the ways in which he goes about searching for it.
Kirkus Reviews
Keyes writes with perception, humor and hard-won wisdom. His book is hopeful and constructive, coming at a time when it is sorely needed.
Hartford Courant
In We, the Lonely People, Ralph Keyes describes and laments the contemporary evidence of our loss of community. His catalog is extensive, and he presents it with imagination,. concern, poignancy and humor.
Psychology Today
The author -- a former newspaperman -- diagnoses the problem of our failing sense of community in a most readable way.
Oklahoma City Oklahoman
Keyes has written a thought-provoking book -- one that should be read by all who are interested in rebuilding society.
Champaign-Urbana News=Gazette
Ralph Keyes ... has written a very perceptive, very honest and very personal book on a great American malaise, the obsession with the loss of community and the search to regain or replace what has been lost.
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
Bill Moyers's former assistant at Newsday, a self-described "habitual comer and goer" skillfully and entertainingly explores our social and individual ambivalence toward community, from Long Island to San Diego. ... Keyes's thesis that we are inhibited from finding community by our desire for mobility, privacy, and convenience is well documented ... Recommended.
Library Journal
Keyes's provocative analysis of modern urban life ... has suggested that within anonymous, impersonal, and lonely environs, "community" assumes different forms ... Git and Go's, 7-Elevens, and shopping centers replace kinship and geographically specific tribal locations.
Urban Life
Here is a profoundly moving book, full of relevant information about the ambivalence of most of us in America today who want both freedom and community and find it hard to experience them together.
Faith/At/Work
A sensitive discussion of our "loss of community" and its resulting loneliness.
The Lutheran Journal
We, the Lonely People is an exciting book about the American society of today ... There is humor and pathos in the knowledgeable observations of the author and in the documented human interest discussions.
Methodist Messenger
Keyes identifies what is happening to us and our communities, and the examples he uses are sharp and clear. The word "community" is dropped so often in our talking that possibly it has become fuzzy in our minds. It's good that someone such as Ralph Keyes has taken this journey and observed and written about community. All of his insights are not comfortable, but they trigger thinking -- a healthy, much needed thinking.
Quaker Life
A well-written, interesting and thoroughly documented book on a somewhat worn theme of the increasingly depersonalized world, yet it does bring new insights and approaches.
The Link
Serious, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.
American Journal of Psychiatry
We, the Lonely People marshals encyclopedic evidence of the pains of isolation in our people's faces and some of their efforts, some sane and some curiously bizarre, to redress the community gap. Mr. Keyes is not very angry, possibly too accepting, but his facts are fascinating and well-documented. ... I liked this book very much as a compendium of significant trends. It is written with charm, wit, and optimism.
Popular Psychology
I would like to recommend to poets and writers generally a new book, We, the Lonely People: Searching for Community by Ralph Keyes. An excellent reporter and lively writer himself, Keyes studies the effect of the breakdown of community in our mass anonymous society as it is expressed in our daily lives. He writes about the strange communities that develop among teenagers in shopping malls, lonely people in laundromats (not to speak of bars and better known places of gathering), in queues outside theaters, in encounter groups, clubs of all sorts (especially the rapidly expanding "anonymous" clubs of alcoholics, overweight people, hot lines and open line talk shows, all ways in which great intimacy is shared on the one hand while essential anonymity is retained on the other). For one thing, the book contains some important insights into the writing world itself -- especially the effects of publications (and television programs) to develop a sense of family among their readers. More profoundly, however, it suggests the themes of search and yearning to which good poetry and fiction today might well be speaking.
Writer's Digest (Judson Jerome)