reviews-lonely

A sensitive discussion of our “loss of community” and its resulting loneliness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Keyes has written a thought-provoking book — one that should be read by all who are interested in rebuilding society.