The End of Solitude
Selected Essays on Culture and Society
These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. In "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," his viral piece from 2008, he sounded the alarm about the Ivy League admissions frenzy and the kind of student it produces. In "Solitude and Leadership," his 2009 address at West Point he issued an early warning about the threats from social media to our inner lives. In "On Political Correctness," from 2017, he dissected the culture of ideological intolerance that has spread, since then, from campus to society at large.
The End of Solitude brings together these and more than forty other essays from such publications as Harper's and the Atlantic and introduces four that are published here for the first time. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully, more meaningfully, more freely. Behind their questions lies a fundamental one: What does it mean to be an individual, and how can we sustain our individuality in an age of networks and groups?
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 23, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798765021613
- File size: 373821 KB
- Duration: 12:58:47
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
May 2, 2022
Essayist Deresiewicz (The Death of the Artist) eviscerates “groupthink” in this razor-sharp collection made up mostly of previously published pieces. Identifying the book’s unifying theme as an “attempt to defend, and, as well as I can, to enact, a certain conception of the self... developed in solitude, in fearless dialogue, by reading, through education as the nurturing of souls; embodied in original art and independent thought,” Deresiewicz is at his most trenchant when analyzing the technological and cultural forces arrayed against his preferred mode of being. He compares the links between TV and boredom—“television, by eliminating the need to learn to make use of one’s lack of occupation, prevents one from discovering how to enjoy it”—to the relationship between the internet and loneliness, alleging that social media and text messaging have helped to rob people of “the propensity for introspection” and “the capacity for solitude.” Elsewhere, Deresiewicz contends that the “culture of political correctness” at elite private colleges provides affluent students and faculty “with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege.” Despite a tendency to generalize and the occasional slip into ungracious embitterment, as when he writes that having a “white penis” put two strikes against him on the academic job market, Deresiewicz anatomizes modern life with skill and fierce conviction. Readers will relish grappling with these erudite provocations. -
AudioFile Magazine
William Deresiewicz, author, essayist, and literary critic, has compiled a variety of essays on solitude and leadership, the pitfalls of an Ivy League education (he previously taught English at Yale), and social media's incursion into daily life, among other timely concerns. Narrator Eric Jason Martin adopts a slow pace that is fitting for the unifying theme of the importance of solitude as an inspiration for reflection, as opposed to the distracting mental noise of constant connection. Martin is clear, informative, and frank as he covers technology culture, higher education, the social imagination, arts and letters, and the Jewish people. While some conclusions are overly sweeping, the writing is, overall, thought-provoking and well elaborated. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
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Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
subjects
Languages
- English
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