Loneliness as a Way of Life is a book about coming to believe in this world, a world in which loneliness is inevitable and connections are still possible. It is also a risky book, because of the way Dumm weaves the personal into the literary and both into politics. The risk is well run: Dumm's is an untimely piece, essential for the time in which we live.

Avoiding cynicism and sentimentality alike, Thomas Dumm's penetrating and painfully personal meditations on the modern condition of loneliness may show us more about ourselves than we can easily bear. Through subtle and provocative readings of Shakespeare, Melville, Arendt, and other thinkers, Dumm finds terms for acknowledging and inhabiting his own loneliness, and perhaps ours as well. His calm yet insistently disarming voice claims and challenges us, even when we resist it.

Thomas Dumm is a wise guide and learned counselor for the great Socratic question: How to live? We are deeply enriched owing to his wisdom and compassion.

[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.

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.

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."

[A] meditative and intensely personal volume.

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.

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.

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.