The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century, by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, 2009, Boston:  Beacon Press.

The intentionally blurred photo book jacket of The Lonely American caught my attention immediately and set the tone for the alarming theme discussed in the book. The flurry and hurry of an urban landscape is peopled by commuters trying to get somewhere. One individual is centred in the photo, and not blurred. Her face and hands are hidden in a raincoat, head slightly hunched, as though burdened, isolated, and compelled to a lonely journey. We are uncomfortably aware and left wondering: the crowd and the woman, so close and so distant. Is she chosen to represent us, caught up in a busy, impersonal, action-driven world? The photo's shutter speed and staging are deliberate. We cannot make out anyone as an individual in the photo. This is a dreamscape of a frightening world, of alienation and uncertain future. Does she choose to walk at her own slower pace and belong only to herself? Is the maddening crowd completely mad — the speedy pace presented as a manic flight intended to defy any limits to energetic modern purposefulness?

In The Lonely American it takes less than 200 pages to paint a mostly pessimistic picture of a burdened US populace, caught up in a twenty-first century epidemic of busyness and material gain, after losing twentieth century social values of communing and face to face human contact. The authors, married psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, present their view of loneliness, covering relevant dimensions of modern life that contribute to anomie, isolation, and self involvement. A startling finding is that 25% of Americans are estimated to have talked to no one about anything of importance in the past six months. Another statistic worth mentioning is one out of four households in America is a one-person household. Slowly, there is a silent progression towards social withdrawal, ‘self reliance’ (Chapter 3), and the denial of social needs. We are living alone with more frequency according to the co-authors, and using up more resources by doing so. Privacy