[Dumm] uses the works of past writers and philosophers such as Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Foucault, along with personal reflections on his feelings after the death of his wife, to explain the multifaceted nature of loneliness. Dumm concludes that loneliness isn't something that we overcome, but it is part of our psychological, political, and social lives. We all share these common areas of loneliness, and only through reflecting on them can we gain a better understanding of how to live with our loneliness. -- Scott Duimstra Library Journal 20080901 Loneliness as a Way of Life doesn't try to be cut-and-dried. It is quizzical, often deeply skeptical, about our intentions as a species. It recognizes that society--and sociability--are messy affairs that bring mixed blessings. Especially in his last, rousing chapter on Emerson, freedom, and responsibility, Mr. Dumm offers a way out of the morass he has described. He makes no false claims that we can vanquish loneliness or fix our thinking in a fresh groove. Instead, he proposes the tempered idea that friendship and group accountability can--indeed, must--live together with our existential solitude. -- Christopher Lane New York Sun 20080930 The greatest writers may have shown how language itself is inadequate to the experience of loneliness. But we have written our experience of loneliness deeply into the language. That too, though, goes to underscore the point that Mr. Dumm's honest book makes: While the "lonely self will always be with us," we can at least come together in search of imaginative ways of expressing that loneliness. We can "write and read to tell each other how we are to be lonely together." -- Andrew Stark Wall Street Journal 20081129 [A] meditative and intensely personal volume. -- Sarah Barmak Toronto Star 20081213 An intriguing volume...This modern world may be the "way of loneliness," but readers should not shy away from the state. In fact, Dumm asserts that loneliness is the impetus that gives us autonomy, the ability to make decisions on our own terms. Although the feeling may be painful, it is only through loneliness that we become true individuals able to make rational decisions and able to interact with others as rational beings. And, in an odd twist, it is this true sense of self-awareness that leads us to seek the community of others. -- Orli Low Los Angeles Times 20090104 For Dumm, loneliness is really about loss. He argues that we have to be willing to reflect on the tragic dimensions of human existence, including the inevitability of our own deaths, to face and ameliorate our loneliness...Only through earnest reflection and a willingness to examine how we live our lives can the ache of loneliness be transformed into its less painful companion: solitude. -- Katharine Mieszkowski Salon 20081222 This is a fascinating book. Dumm articulates the intuition that many of the ways in which we understand our communal existence within a polity, ranging from the distinction between the public and the private spheres to the weakness of our interpersonal attachments, stem from the loneliness that is manifested within the modern world. Believing that loneliness is resistant to the traditional philosophical approach of describing the phenomenon at hand, then analyzing and critiquing it, Dumm draws on several important artistic works (from King Lear, to Moby-Dick, to the film Paris, Texas) to explore this issue and to illuminate his intuitions concerning it. Just as this volume is not a traditional philosophical treatise, it is not a traditional volume of literary criticism, for Dumm is deeply and personally involved with the subject of loneliness, and he reaches into his own experiences of it to explore it more fully. -- J. S. Taylor Choice 20090401

Thomas Dumm is William H. Hastie '25 Professor of Political Ethics at Amherst College. His most recent book is A Politics of the Ordinary.