What do you think?
Rate this book
The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society
A passionate, probing collection gathering nearly thirty years of groundbreaking reflection on culture and society alongside four new essays, by one of our most respected essayists and critics.
What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. The End of Solitude brings together more than forty of his finest essays, including four that are published here for the first time.
Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. 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 and freely, and they pose two fundamental What does it mean to be an individual, and how can we sustain our individuality in an age of networks and groups?
What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. The End of Solitude brings together more than forty of his finest essays, including four that are published here for the first time.
Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. 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 and freely, and they pose two fundamental What does it mean to be an individual, and how can we sustain our individuality in an age of networks and groups?
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2022
53 people are currently reading
2815 people want to read
About the author
William Deresiewicz
14 books268 followersWilliam Deresiewicz was an associate professor of English at Yale University until 2008 and is a widely published book critic. His reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Bookforum, and The American Scholar. He was nominated for National Magazine awards in 2008 and 2009 and the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2010.
Wlliam Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent college speaker, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer in 2008.
Wlliam Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent college speaker, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer in 2008.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
September 19, 2022
Our culture is scientistic: it believes that science is the only form of truth, that there is only one way of knowing: objective, empirical, quantitative. But our culture also displays... what I have come to think of as the engineering mentality.
My first exposure to William Deresiewicz stretches back to my experiences in AP English Language and Composition class during my junior year of high school. It was there, in the early days of social media, that I read this collection's titular essay and was quite engrossed and excited by the experience. To say the least, my brain was not a fan of reading on computer screens, being regularly interrupted by text messages, and socializing via Facebook. Seeing my concerns about the effects of technology on learning, culture, and consciousness reinforced by a former Yale English professor and professional writer was a private "gold star" of sorts that made me feel intellectually precocious and otherwise self-satisfied. Of course, this attitude, my professional ambitions, and achievement-focused academic career are precisely the types of thing Deresiewicz laments in educational contexts, but I was blissfully unaware of this and happy to continue on my path. It wasn't until many years later in an intellectually curious and voracious period (after completing my long journey in the academy) that I have rediscovered Deresiewicz's work. Although I now deeply disagree with Deresiewicz on many topics, including technology, I've cherished the opportunity to return to his writing and delighted in being challenged by his ideas.
The End of Solitude is a wide-ranging collection of essays designed to showcase the best of Deresiewicz's writing over the last three decades. It is an impressive work organized into six sections: culture and technology, higher education problems, social trends, art criticism, profiles of important figures in art and criticism, and reflections on Jewish identity. The first half of the work coheres better thematically than the latter half. The earlier essays revolve around related concerns and claims about the deterioration of intellectual, cultural, and civic institutions in America from a distinct perspective - a hard-to-label yet easy-to-detect leftwing Romanticism moderated by elite aesthetic preferences and inspired by disaffection. These early essays are also the more accessible and topical, where as the later essays are often longer, more reflective, and less organized by specific arguments. There is of course variation in length and quality of the pieces, but I think most prospective readers would benefit from reading through to completion so as to develop an appreciation of Deresiewicz's erudition and passion for writing and his ideas. He's written some of the more elegant and pithy sentences I've seen in recent writing.
In the years since high school, I've grown more skeptical of Deresiewicz's ideas concerning the effects of technology on the self and the problems with higher education. Concerning the former, I think Deresiewicz's anxiety that the near ubiquitous mediation of personal and social experience by technology is causing the loss of "both halves of the Romantic dialectic" (solitude and friendship), is mostly misplaced. He seems concerned that Western culture has lost a particular form of consciousness that was unique to elites in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is unclear if this is really a problem of any kind or just a change. Moreover, "solitude," in Deresiewicz's meaning, i.e. an autodidactic self-exploratory process and maverick mode, was also probably lost well before the invention of social media. The invention of mass culture, television and radio, and anti-mass elitist mass culture (something Deresiewicz also describes and laments) brought about or at least hastened "the end of solitude." The constant stream of digital stimulation may indeed impair "solitude" with greater intensity than before and maybe we should be worried, but nothing is stopping us from hitting the off button either. Maybe we should think more about why no one really chooses that option (even Deresiewicz), and those who do aren't exactly intellectual heroes (Ted Kaczynski). Nonetheless, the essays on the issues raised by technology and the omnipotent of market integration even into the personal sphere (Deresiewicz like many left-of-center thinkers uses the pejorative term "neoliberalism" to point out this phenomenon) are provocative and deserve contemplation. I think it would be unfair to flippantly dismiss Deresiewicz's ideas as Neo-Luddism without trying to empathize with his perspective on technology despite the obvious advantages it has wrought.
When it comes to higher education, Deresiewicz directs most of his complaints at the wrong targets: the student population (customer mindsets, political orthodoxy, and know-nothing over-achievement complexes) and the sociocultural expectations concerning the function of college (job training rather than intellectual training). The more important targets should be the system constructed by the professionals in higher education and the rent-seeking enabled by legislators through subsidies like federal student loans and accreditation. These groups don't entirely escape Deresiewicz's critical eye, but they are not the focus they should be. Deresiewicz doesn't reckon directly enough with the relationship between higher education and elites. Higher education, especially the kind associated with intellectual prestige, is an experience for elites and luxury only available to them. Most of the cultural and intellectual practices that Deresiewicz is eager to preserve and reinvigorate are almost entirely and utterly the province of elites, and it is only the growth and excess wealth created by markets that enables these enriching practices. We should talk more plainly about this, which may also remedy some of the issues with higher education. Subsequently, Deresiewicz's prescriptions to fix higher ed seem wildly out-of-step with his ideals about the liberal arts and the importance of the humanities.
Finally, I enjoyed The End of Solitude deeply because it ruminates on ideas, topics, and figures that are often absent from public discourse. The humanities as Deresiewicz laments have lost culture relevance, and it is enlivening to see them in the foreground for once. Moreover, it was refreshing to see an author with an idiosyncratic compilation of influences, ranging from milquetoast conservative cultural critics like David Brooks to bohemian Marxist art critics like Harold Rosenberg to liberal-then-neoconservative literary critics like Lionel Trilling, that somehow mixed together make sense. Plus there are random gems to be discovered in the collection. For instance. Deresiewicz's essay on Harold Bloom, which compared him to Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness was a rollickingly creative yet cutting work of meta-criticism (I'm actually a big fan of Bloom's) and a history of late 20th century literary theory. Pick up The End of Solitude and enrich and challenge yourself. Explore!
Some Pieces from The End of Solitude worth highlighting:
"The End of Solitude"
"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"
"Generation Sell"
"Upper Middle Brow"
"The Platinum Age"
"Harold Bloom: The Horror, the Horror"
*Disclosure: I received The End of Solitude as an ARC through NetGalley.
August 1, 2023
3.5 stars rounded up.
The End of Solitude is a collection of essays broken into parts by subject matter. The first two parts, Technology Culture and Higher Education contain excellent essays, though not prescriptive ones. Deresiewicz's insights into the failures of modern society are accurate and often painful to read, but self-affirming: for a reader like me there was a slight echo chamber feeling here (which is hardly a criticism). There are sixteen essays in these two sections, and despite a lot of thematic overlap and even outright repetition, upon concluding the second part I was convinced this was a five-star book. I recommended the book to several friends and family based on these essays.
The third part, The Social Imagination, is less hard hitting, easier to consume, and mostly informative, though doesn't keep up with the standards of the first two. Ranking unchanged.
With a little less than halfway to go, the subsequent collections follow: Arts, Letters, My People.
These essays are much harder for me to review. The failure is mine. My ignorance is why this second half of the book failed. There are two long essays on dance. I know very little about dance and have only a passing interest in it, though I'd say I know more than the average joe (at least in the circles I run in) simply based on having enjoyed ballet and opera over the years. That said, I certainly couldn't maintain one side of a conversation on the top schools of choreography, and reading two long essays on the subject did little to change that. Deresiewicz makes no effort to educate here, that's not his goal. These essays were in fact written for a dance publication. I was excluded. Similarly, his essay on art. Despite an above average knowledge of the figures involved, again, I felt left out. This essay, like the dance ones, requires deep knowledge of the subject.
I felt a little better about the Letters section, in that I'd consider myself somewhat well read, I thought I'd at least be educated enough to keep up, but no, not really. He lost me again. Deresiewicz does a deep survey of intellectual writings, the bulk of which felt like intellectual elitist name droppings more than anything else. Despite being familiar with some of the names, the essays didn't connect with me. Not until his long take down of Harold Bloom and his review of The Novel, A Biography (which I happen to be reading right now, coincidentally) did I feel reconnected, but the damage had been done. Alienation.
By the final section, My People, consisting of five essays focused on Jewish identity, I'd say these are almost actively standoffish, even pugnacious. I had to just come to terms with the fact that this book wasn't intended for a reader such as myself. But that being the case, then who the hell is it intended for? That's my biggest gripe here. Deresiewicz is an excellent writer, and these are excellent essays. An art critic stumbling across this essay in an art magazine would be finely served. Similarly, the two dance essays. Deresiewicz doesn't pander, nor would he need to or be expected to in those forums. As it stands though, this is a collection that I'd only feel comfortable recommending to someone of Jewish heritage or deep interest in Jewish culture, who also happens to be an elite historian of capital L literature (Dostoyevsky and Joyce don't count, too popular)and lit theory, a dance aficionado/expert, an art critic, and bonus points if they have a master's degree in all of those.
Like I said, my failing. But I can't help but see a missed opportunity here. A collection of intellectual essays on culture already feels like a limited market, but then with this second half we're looking at a market of only tenured professors, ironically of whom WD doesn't have a lot positive to say about in the first half. If anything, when collecting, maybe include some new material to help educate the uninitiated. While I can see that a few asides giving some brief context might be tedious to those in the know, it seems a better alternative than excluding those not.
A disappointing finish to an excellent start.
Thanks Goodreads and Henry Holt for the review copy.
The End of Solitude is a collection of essays broken into parts by subject matter. The first two parts, Technology Culture and Higher Education contain excellent essays, though not prescriptive ones. Deresiewicz's insights into the failures of modern society are accurate and often painful to read, but self-affirming: for a reader like me there was a slight echo chamber feeling here (which is hardly a criticism). There are sixteen essays in these two sections, and despite a lot of thematic overlap and even outright repetition, upon concluding the second part I was convinced this was a five-star book. I recommended the book to several friends and family based on these essays.
The third part, The Social Imagination, is less hard hitting, easier to consume, and mostly informative, though doesn't keep up with the standards of the first two. Ranking unchanged.
With a little less than halfway to go, the subsequent collections follow: Arts, Letters, My People.
These essays are much harder for me to review. The failure is mine. My ignorance is why this second half of the book failed. There are two long essays on dance. I know very little about dance and have only a passing interest in it, though I'd say I know more than the average joe (at least in the circles I run in) simply based on having enjoyed ballet and opera over the years. That said, I certainly couldn't maintain one side of a conversation on the top schools of choreography, and reading two long essays on the subject did little to change that. Deresiewicz makes no effort to educate here, that's not his goal. These essays were in fact written for a dance publication. I was excluded. Similarly, his essay on art. Despite an above average knowledge of the figures involved, again, I felt left out. This essay, like the dance ones, requires deep knowledge of the subject.
I felt a little better about the Letters section, in that I'd consider myself somewhat well read, I thought I'd at least be educated enough to keep up, but no, not really. He lost me again. Deresiewicz does a deep survey of intellectual writings, the bulk of which felt like intellectual elitist name droppings more than anything else. Despite being familiar with some of the names, the essays didn't connect with me. Not until his long take down of Harold Bloom and his review of The Novel, A Biography (which I happen to be reading right now, coincidentally) did I feel reconnected, but the damage had been done. Alienation.
By the final section, My People, consisting of five essays focused on Jewish identity, I'd say these are almost actively standoffish, even pugnacious. I had to just come to terms with the fact that this book wasn't intended for a reader such as myself. But that being the case, then who the hell is it intended for? That's my biggest gripe here. Deresiewicz is an excellent writer, and these are excellent essays. An art critic stumbling across this essay in an art magazine would be finely served. Similarly, the two dance essays. Deresiewicz doesn't pander, nor would he need to or be expected to in those forums. As it stands though, this is a collection that I'd only feel comfortable recommending to someone of Jewish heritage or deep interest in Jewish culture, who also happens to be an elite historian of capital L literature (Dostoyevsky and Joyce don't count, too popular)and lit theory, a dance aficionado/expert, an art critic, and bonus points if they have a master's degree in all of those.
Like I said, my failing. But I can't help but see a missed opportunity here. A collection of intellectual essays on culture already feels like a limited market, but then with this second half we're looking at a market of only tenured professors, ironically of whom WD doesn't have a lot positive to say about in the first half. If anything, when collecting, maybe include some new material to help educate the uninitiated. While I can see that a few asides giving some brief context might be tedious to those in the know, it seems a better alternative than excluding those not.
A disappointing finish to an excellent start.
Thanks Goodreads and Henry Holt for the review copy.
August 8, 2022
I won this on GoodReads. A lot of what Mr. Deresiewicz says about our cultural and society in this set of essays is right on the nose. These essays make you think and consider and even perhaps, change a few things in how you interact with those in your circle and society. This is a good read.
March 11, 2023
Incredibly uneven. I thought one or two of the essays were brilliant, but some were so pretentious and some incomprehensible.
March 5, 2022
“We have lost the capacity for idleness.”
A lyrical analysis comprised of short stories outlining culture, explaining modernism by reflecting on history, and how we are replacing and redefining the meaning of solitude in the era of constant connectedness.
Deresiewicz begins by exploring philosophical idealisms on the soul and solitude - romanticism vs modernism’s opposing dialectic on what the soul and self actually is. The End of Solitude is a compilation of thoughts on post-modernism, and insightful questions on what it means to be a contemporary human being.
Sometimes it felt epistolary in nature, as if I were reading an intimate diary, debating whether the strive for authenticity and self-validation were an assault on oneself. The insight on the dichotomy of connectedness through social media, living in relation to others, has created more loneliness rang powerful and true.
“The great contemporary terror is anonymity.” While some of these takes aren’t exactly groundbreaking (the debate on whether social media has done more harm than good has been around since the dawn of E-mail) it was a lyrically articulate piece of work that probes us to sink inwardly and ask ourselves what it means to live meaningfully.
Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
A lyrical analysis comprised of short stories outlining culture, explaining modernism by reflecting on history, and how we are replacing and redefining the meaning of solitude in the era of constant connectedness.
Deresiewicz begins by exploring philosophical idealisms on the soul and solitude - romanticism vs modernism’s opposing dialectic on what the soul and self actually is. The End of Solitude is a compilation of thoughts on post-modernism, and insightful questions on what it means to be a contemporary human being.
Sometimes it felt epistolary in nature, as if I were reading an intimate diary, debating whether the strive for authenticity and self-validation were an assault on oneself. The insight on the dichotomy of connectedness through social media, living in relation to others, has created more loneliness rang powerful and true.
“The great contemporary terror is anonymity.” While some of these takes aren’t exactly groundbreaking (the debate on whether social media has done more harm than good has been around since the dawn of E-mail) it was a lyrically articulate piece of work that probes us to sink inwardly and ask ourselves what it means to live meaningfully.
Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
September 13, 2022
4.5 stars.
May 13, 2022
The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz is an insightful collection of essays that insists on the reader engaging with the ideas.
While the essays run from general and more abstract to the very specific in place and time they all address how we are living and interacting in this moment in history. For readers who read for more than simply understanding the essay these also offer many avenues into considering how we view and participate in our society.
What I think I appreciate the most is that even when I might wonder whether I agree with parts of what he says, I never feel that I have to either accept every nuance or dismiss him entirely. Fortunately, I found far more common ground than disagreement, partly because he presents these ideas as open for discussion rather than him telling us what to believe.
Though we will all find different elements that will send us off on our own tangents, I will mention a couple that gave me the opportunity to think beyond, but in conversation with, the text. In one early essay he states the Sartre line (without attribution) hell is other people. This was in a discussion of how people today position themselves in the world. Which immediately brought Sartre's concept of The Look to mind, how we become objects rather than subjects once we realize we are being watched. In the age of social media, it has become less a case of "being watched" than of "presenting oneself to be watched." We become far less subject and even when thinking of ourselves, we are thinking of ourselves as objects. In fact, objects we create for the consumption of those we get to watch us. My tangent led me right back around to his essay, which makes the same basic point.
The other place that stands out for me is when he tosses off the last sentence in Orwell's Animal Farm. In addition to the specific historical moment Orwell was writing to, and the related political applications many later readers consider, I started thinking about the way the idea applies just as easily to smaller situations, from organizations to interpersonal relationships. Then, back to government, I thought about how it can be taken in so many ways. If the pigs are like people and the people pigs, then is change even worth the effort? I certainly think so. I go to the other extreme, however. I think it shows that trying to make change from within when the system is corrupt won't work, I think a major overhaul is necessary. In the US, trying to make incremental change not only hasn't worked, but has shifted the center so far to the right that what was once liberal is now extreme left. Which puts me way out to the left since I am far left of liberal. Any means necessary!
What I hope my rambling has shown is that this book helps a reader to think deeper about things that matter to them. My thoughts don't reflect Deresiewicz's views or political opinions, they are my part of my discussion with the book. Your discussion will be whatever his words spark in your mind. Read this book actively and dynamically and you will be rewarded. Even if you don't, you'll still enjoy the writing and his ideas, but that is just half of what he is offering you.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
While the essays run from general and more abstract to the very specific in place and time they all address how we are living and interacting in this moment in history. For readers who read for more than simply understanding the essay these also offer many avenues into considering how we view and participate in our society.
What I think I appreciate the most is that even when I might wonder whether I agree with parts of what he says, I never feel that I have to either accept every nuance or dismiss him entirely. Fortunately, I found far more common ground than disagreement, partly because he presents these ideas as open for discussion rather than him telling us what to believe.
Though we will all find different elements that will send us off on our own tangents, I will mention a couple that gave me the opportunity to think beyond, but in conversation with, the text. In one early essay he states the Sartre line (without attribution) hell is other people. This was in a discussion of how people today position themselves in the world. Which immediately brought Sartre's concept of The Look to mind, how we become objects rather than subjects once we realize we are being watched. In the age of social media, it has become less a case of "being watched" than of "presenting oneself to be watched." We become far less subject and even when thinking of ourselves, we are thinking of ourselves as objects. In fact, objects we create for the consumption of those we get to watch us. My tangent led me right back around to his essay, which makes the same basic point.
The other place that stands out for me is when he tosses off the last sentence in Orwell's Animal Farm. In addition to the specific historical moment Orwell was writing to, and the related political applications many later readers consider, I started thinking about the way the idea applies just as easily to smaller situations, from organizations to interpersonal relationships. Then, back to government, I thought about how it can be taken in so many ways. If the pigs are like people and the people pigs, then is change even worth the effort? I certainly think so. I go to the other extreme, however. I think it shows that trying to make change from within when the system is corrupt won't work, I think a major overhaul is necessary. In the US, trying to make incremental change not only hasn't worked, but has shifted the center so far to the right that what was once liberal is now extreme left. Which puts me way out to the left since I am far left of liberal. Any means necessary!
What I hope my rambling has shown is that this book helps a reader to think deeper about things that matter to them. My thoughts don't reflect Deresiewicz's views or political opinions, they are my part of my discussion with the book. Your discussion will be whatever his words spark in your mind. Read this book actively and dynamically and you will be rewarded. Even if you don't, you'll still enjoy the writing and his ideas, but that is just half of what he is offering you.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
May 3, 2024
3.5, rounded up.
Deresiewicz’s collection of essays ticks all the boxes I want a collection of essays to tick:
The subjects are wide and varied
The writing is not academic, meaning that there is humour and it is easy to follow – but it has the quality and strength of academic writing
And, most importantly: I get to thinking.
This is a very delicious collection of essays, grouped under 6 different categories (Technology Culture being about internet and social media, Higher Education is self-explanatory, The Social Imagination about our society and its values, Arts and Letters again self-explanatory, My People about the Jewish and Deresiewicz’s experience with Judaism.) There are longer essays and shorter “idea bulletins” or mini-essays, from as early as 1994 until 2022. And I think I should note that I did not know of Deresiewicz beforehand, so I had no prejudice going into this.
Of those categories, my favourites were the three first ones. As much as I enjoy arts and literature, the two categories were very niche – in-depth analysis of a dancer I didn’t recognize, a lengthy essay of TV which was interesting but felt outdated what with how little it discussed streaming. And in literature, I was deeply fascinated by the first one, on aLfred Kazin; the rest were of authors I hadn’t read, or on topics I didn’t care that much for (great American novels or Great American Novels – bleh. Deresiewicz is America-centric, and by that point I had become annoyed at that world view.) The last category, the essays dealing with Judaism, were interesting to read. I especially enjoyed the first one, Birthrights which analyses the danger of basing your personal identity and personality on that of a communal identity.
As I said, I liked this collection, mainly because it made me think – I was agreeing with the author, and also disagreeing, constructing the counter-arguments and criticisms in my head. For example, in the short essay The Girl with the High-Speed Connection Deresiewicz writes how Lisbeth Salander of the Millennium series is one example of the “breed of girl-heroes”, strong female characters in fiction who posses more autonomy and agenda than the ones before them. Lisbeth Salander, for example, “works for herself and [--] repels intimacy”, “is sexually assertive, sexually omnivorous” and “is never bewildered, never at loss”. I have no issues with these descriptions. My issue with this mini-essay is the fact that Deresiewicz compares Salander with Katniss Everdeen of Hunger Games. Salander is an adult character, who works a job in a crime novel rooted in our contemporary society. Everdeen is a teenager fighting a dystopian government in a scifi book. I don’t know about you, but considering that Hunger Games was written for the teenage audience, I am ok with the main character not being overtly sexually assertive, or repelling intimacy, or being never bewildered. Coincidentally, I also like Everdeen as a character and the Hunger Games as a series considerably more than Salander & Millennium.
The above-mentioned essay is only one, but it perhaps bugged me the most. And I know the point of the essay is not the comparison between the two – it is to note that Lisbeth Salander, with her computer and hacking skills, is a generational hero, a torchbearer of the digital age. But the comparison still bugged me.
Going forward, I seem to sense that Deresiwicz has a disdain for feminists, and liberals despite claiming to be one himself. He criticizes the way academia seems to focus too much on “interrogating” the texts that are studied, to reveal how they exist only to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy and thus draw them of their power – yeah, I can see what he means. I can agree. Because even works that are “problematic” can be beautiful, can be enjoyable (especially if their author is dead and cannot profit from them anymore – Rowling is a different case) and can be read as such. And, linking to this, is Deresiewicz’s pondering on political correctness and how too much of that can lead to self-sensure, a phenomena which one can sometimes observe especially within the radical left.
But Deresiewicz also criticizes feminists for complaining about how right now is a hard time to be a woman in America “at a time when women earn 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 64 percent of master’s degrees, and 56 percent of doctorates” (this comes from the essay birthrights which I praised above – it is a good essay). For someone who criticizes academia – having dedicated a whole section of the book to higher education – and speaks for political education, leadership (and for a proper definition of leadership), and liberal studies, he doesn’t seem to care that the highest percentage of women in congress is less than one third (28 percent, as of January 2023), that of 115 justices in the US supreme court, only 6 have been women, and that the percentage of female presidents in the US is a round number: 0%. Deresiewicz seems to almost be bitter about the fact that currently there are more female students than male students (even if women still earn on average 16% less than their male counterparts); at some point, he notes that he fact his having a white penis “put to strikes against me on the job market”. It’s giving bitter man.
Nevertheless! I liked this collection, and I mean that. As I said, these pieces made me think of counter-arguments, as evidenced here, ha. Would recommend.
Deresiewicz’s collection of essays ticks all the boxes I want a collection of essays to tick:
The subjects are wide and varied
The writing is not academic, meaning that there is humour and it is easy to follow – but it has the quality and strength of academic writing
And, most importantly: I get to thinking.
This is a very delicious collection of essays, grouped under 6 different categories (Technology Culture being about internet and social media, Higher Education is self-explanatory, The Social Imagination about our society and its values, Arts and Letters again self-explanatory, My People about the Jewish and Deresiewicz’s experience with Judaism.) There are longer essays and shorter “idea bulletins” or mini-essays, from as early as 1994 until 2022. And I think I should note that I did not know of Deresiewicz beforehand, so I had no prejudice going into this.
Of those categories, my favourites were the three first ones. As much as I enjoy arts and literature, the two categories were very niche – in-depth analysis of a dancer I didn’t recognize, a lengthy essay of TV which was interesting but felt outdated what with how little it discussed streaming. And in literature, I was deeply fascinated by the first one, on aLfred Kazin; the rest were of authors I hadn’t read, or on topics I didn’t care that much for (great American novels or Great American Novels – bleh. Deresiewicz is America-centric, and by that point I had become annoyed at that world view.) The last category, the essays dealing with Judaism, were interesting to read. I especially enjoyed the first one, Birthrights which analyses the danger of basing your personal identity and personality on that of a communal identity.
As I said, I liked this collection, mainly because it made me think – I was agreeing with the author, and also disagreeing, constructing the counter-arguments and criticisms in my head. For example, in the short essay The Girl with the High-Speed Connection Deresiewicz writes how Lisbeth Salander of the Millennium series is one example of the “breed of girl-heroes”, strong female characters in fiction who posses more autonomy and agenda than the ones before them. Lisbeth Salander, for example, “works for herself and [--] repels intimacy”, “is sexually assertive, sexually omnivorous” and “is never bewildered, never at loss”. I have no issues with these descriptions. My issue with this mini-essay is the fact that Deresiewicz compares Salander with Katniss Everdeen of Hunger Games. Salander is an adult character, who works a job in a crime novel rooted in our contemporary society. Everdeen is a teenager fighting a dystopian government in a scifi book. I don’t know about you, but considering that Hunger Games was written for the teenage audience, I am ok with the main character not being overtly sexually assertive, or repelling intimacy, or being never bewildered. Coincidentally, I also like Everdeen as a character and the Hunger Games as a series considerably more than Salander & Millennium.
The above-mentioned essay is only one, but it perhaps bugged me the most. And I know the point of the essay is not the comparison between the two – it is to note that Lisbeth Salander, with her computer and hacking skills, is a generational hero, a torchbearer of the digital age. But the comparison still bugged me.
Going forward, I seem to sense that Deresiwicz has a disdain for feminists, and liberals despite claiming to be one himself. He criticizes the way academia seems to focus too much on “interrogating” the texts that are studied, to reveal how they exist only to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy and thus draw them of their power – yeah, I can see what he means. I can agree. Because even works that are “problematic” can be beautiful, can be enjoyable (especially if their author is dead and cannot profit from them anymore – Rowling is a different case) and can be read as such. And, linking to this, is Deresiewicz’s pondering on political correctness and how too much of that can lead to self-sensure, a phenomena which one can sometimes observe especially within the radical left.
But Deresiewicz also criticizes feminists for complaining about how right now is a hard time to be a woman in America “at a time when women earn 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 64 percent of master’s degrees, and 56 percent of doctorates” (this comes from the essay birthrights which I praised above – it is a good essay). For someone who criticizes academia – having dedicated a whole section of the book to higher education – and speaks for political education, leadership (and for a proper definition of leadership), and liberal studies, he doesn’t seem to care that the highest percentage of women in congress is less than one third (28 percent, as of January 2023), that of 115 justices in the US supreme court, only 6 have been women, and that the percentage of female presidents in the US is a round number: 0%. Deresiewicz seems to almost be bitter about the fact that currently there are more female students than male students (even if women still earn on average 16% less than their male counterparts); at some point, he notes that he fact his having a white penis “put to strikes against me on the job market”. It’s giving bitter man.
Nevertheless! I liked this collection, and I mean that. As I said, these pieces made me think of counter-arguments, as evidenced here, ha. Would recommend.
October 18, 2022
Cranky, erudite, humanist and oh yay, as big a fan of Clive James and suspicious of Harold Abrams as this reader could desire - if you're going to buy a collection of essays this year, make it this one.
July 29, 2023
Having finished Bill Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist, a sad story for anybody who loves art, and appreciates the work of artists of all sorts, I dove right into The End of Solitude, a collection of essays and commentary by the same author. The book covers a wide range of topics, from a take-down of Harold Bloom, to reflections on the elite capture of higher education, to the darker aspects of the Internet and unfortunately ubiquitous social media. He writes with honesty and intelligence, making you feel a little bit smarter once you put it down. It's a deeply personal book, written by a true intellectual who left the academic world to pursue his passion for art and humanity. My only quibble would be with the title, that subconsciously made me expect a book about loneliness, which it is not. Solitude is here seen as a foundation for independent thinking, something that makes Deresiewicz's work possible.
September 24, 2022
Thought provoking on many topics. Great read.
November 16, 2024
“We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.”
“Long before they got to college, they transformed themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers”
“Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they are more independent of spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class (or they did, but decided to pass on the Ivies anyway)…. projects that had nothing to do with school or even looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not résumés.”
“The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living the “life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.”
“I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time, and the best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.”
“the kid whom everybody wants at their school but nobody wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will eventually be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision.”
“The purpose of studying (literature) is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. ”
“Students stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the theoretical winds were blowing, designing their dissertations to catch the swell of the latest trend. ”
“I was having trouble professionalizing because, fundamentally, I didn’t care about the profession. I didn’t believe in the profession. I didn’t think that writing literary monographs and journal articles, or going to academic conferences, does much of any good for anyone…. I was just less interested than other people in participating in the pretense.”
“It certainly seemed a better use of my ability than writing another journal article.”
“Trotskyites argued with social democrats, Maoists with Leninists, trade union liberals with anarcho-syndicalists, reformists with revolutionaries. Which meant that students couldn’t just believe: they had to debate; they had to think things through; they had to know what they were talking about. Debate and contention, in fact, were pretty much what it meant to be a college student”
“an older conception of college: as a place that teaches you, precisely, how to think: that teaches you to think. ”
“But when you study Plato, Senechal says—or Shakespeare, I would add, or anything else in the humanities—there is no such thing as mastery. No one ever masters those works, which is precisely why they are worth coming back to again and again. ”
“that is not given, but achieved.
If I had to pick a single word to sum up what reflection can help you achieve, what Arendt found so missing in the problem-solvers, in the technocrats, it would indeed be “wisdom.” It is no coincidence that “philosophy,” a practice that was founded, in the West, by Socrates himself, means “love of wisdom.”
“And if I had to define wisdom, I would say that it’s a kind of deftness, a sort of tact or touch, in the application of knowledge, specifically such knowledge as derives from experience. A wise person is the kind of person you go to not for information, but for counsel; not for good answers, but for better questions.
Wisdom, of course, is associated with age, and for good reason. Most of us do not achieve it until relatively late in life (if then). ”
“I said that the chief question that the world imposes on you, and that college ought to help you begin to work out, is “who are you?” The heart of reflection is self-reflection; the essence of knowledge is self-knowledge.”
“Before you change the world, you have to change your
mind.”
“neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. ”
“The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers. I wrote a book last year that said that elite American universities no longer provide their students, by and large, with what I called a real education, one that addresses them as complete human beings rather than as future specialists—that enables them, as I put it, to build a self or (following John Keats) become a soul. ”
“David Brooks, responding both to Pinker and myself, laid out the matter very clearly. College, he noted, has three potential purposes: the commercial (preparing to start a career), the cognitive (learning stuff, or better, learning how to think), and the moral (the purpose that Pinker and his ilk find so mysterious). “Moral,” here, does not mean learning right from wrong. It means developing the ability to make autonomous choices—to determine your own beliefs, independent of parents, peers, and society. To live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
“Only the commercial purpose now survives as a recognized value. Even the cognitive purpose, which one would think should be the center of a college education, is tolerated only in so far as it contributes to the first…“
“At most colleges, the lion’s share of students major in vocational fields: business, communications, education, health. But even at elite institutions, the most popular majors are the practical, or as Brooks might say, the commercial ones: economics, biology, engineering, and computer science.”
“From the Romantics, at the dawn of modernity, all the way through the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, the young were understood to have a special role: to step outside the world and question it. To change it, with whatever opposition from adults. ”
“Youth, now, is nothing more than a preliminary form of adulthood, and the quiet desperation of middle age has been imported backward into adolescence…And as everybody knows by now, it isn’t just postmodern youth; it is also postmodern childhood—for children, too, increasingly are miniature adults, chasing endlessly for rank and status.”
“the liberal arts are those fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake. When you study the liberal arts, I added, what you are principally learning to do is make arguments.”
“law, medicine, finance, consulting, science, and academia… Nor is it an accident that the first four of those (the four that also happen to be lucrative) are the top choices among graduates of the most selective schools.”
“So as college is increasingly understood in terms of job and career, and job and career increasingly mean business, especially entrepreneurship (in this age that idealizes the entrepreneur), students have developed a parallel curriculum for themselves, a parallel college, where they can get the skills they think they really need. Those extracurriculars that students are deserting the classroom for are less and less what Pinker denigrates as “recreational” and more and more oriented toward future employment: entrepreneurial endeavors, nonprofit ventures, various forms of volunteerism and employment. The big thing now on campuses—or rather, off them—is internships.”
“There are a lot of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. But now that kind of contact is increasingly unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else.”
“Neoliberalism disarms us in another sense, as well. For all its talk of freedom and individual initiative, it is remarkably good at inculcating a sense of helplessness. So much of the rhetoric around college today, and so much of the negative response to my suggestion that students worry less about pursuing wealth and more about constructing a sense of purpose for themselves, bespeak the idea that young people, that all people, are the passive objects of economic forces. That they have no agency, no options. That they have to do what the market tells them. A Princeton student literally made this argument to me. If the market is incentivizing me to go to Wall Street, he said, then who am I to argue?”
“The worst thing about “leadership,” the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of “citizenship,” the notion that it should be run by everyone together. Citizenship, not coincidentally—the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society—was long the guiding principle of education in the United States.”
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of public purposes.”
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar society: free, high-quality mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
“The way out of poverty was politics,” he later wrote, “[b]ut to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect (philosophy).”
“Go (pursue a PhD) if you feel that your happiness depends on it, I’d say—it can be a great experience—but be aware of what you’re signing up for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.”
“If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself.”
“Long before they got to college, they transformed themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers”
“Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they are more independent of spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class (or they did, but decided to pass on the Ivies anyway)…. projects that had nothing to do with school or even looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not résumés.”
“The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living the “life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.”
“I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time, and the best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.”
“the kid whom everybody wants at their school but nobody wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will eventually be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision.”
“The purpose of studying (literature) is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. ”
“Students stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the theoretical winds were blowing, designing their dissertations to catch the swell of the latest trend. ”
“I was having trouble professionalizing because, fundamentally, I didn’t care about the profession. I didn’t believe in the profession. I didn’t think that writing literary monographs and journal articles, or going to academic conferences, does much of any good for anyone…. I was just less interested than other people in participating in the pretense.”
“It certainly seemed a better use of my ability than writing another journal article.”
“Trotskyites argued with social democrats, Maoists with Leninists, trade union liberals with anarcho-syndicalists, reformists with revolutionaries. Which meant that students couldn’t just believe: they had to debate; they had to think things through; they had to know what they were talking about. Debate and contention, in fact, were pretty much what it meant to be a college student”
“an older conception of college: as a place that teaches you, precisely, how to think: that teaches you to think. ”
“But when you study Plato, Senechal says—or Shakespeare, I would add, or anything else in the humanities—there is no such thing as mastery. No one ever masters those works, which is precisely why they are worth coming back to again and again. ”
“that is not given, but achieved.
If I had to pick a single word to sum up what reflection can help you achieve, what Arendt found so missing in the problem-solvers, in the technocrats, it would indeed be “wisdom.” It is no coincidence that “philosophy,” a practice that was founded, in the West, by Socrates himself, means “love of wisdom.”
“And if I had to define wisdom, I would say that it’s a kind of deftness, a sort of tact or touch, in the application of knowledge, specifically such knowledge as derives from experience. A wise person is the kind of person you go to not for information, but for counsel; not for good answers, but for better questions.
Wisdom, of course, is associated with age, and for good reason. Most of us do not achieve it until relatively late in life (if then). ”
“I said that the chief question that the world imposes on you, and that college ought to help you begin to work out, is “who are you?” The heart of reflection is self-reflection; the essence of knowledge is self-knowledge.”
“Before you change the world, you have to change your
mind.”
“neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. ”
“The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers. I wrote a book last year that said that elite American universities no longer provide their students, by and large, with what I called a real education, one that addresses them as complete human beings rather than as future specialists—that enables them, as I put it, to build a self or (following John Keats) become a soul. ”
“David Brooks, responding both to Pinker and myself, laid out the matter very clearly. College, he noted, has three potential purposes: the commercial (preparing to start a career), the cognitive (learning stuff, or better, learning how to think), and the moral (the purpose that Pinker and his ilk find so mysterious). “Moral,” here, does not mean learning right from wrong. It means developing the ability to make autonomous choices—to determine your own beliefs, independent of parents, peers, and society. To live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
“Only the commercial purpose now survives as a recognized value. Even the cognitive purpose, which one would think should be the center of a college education, is tolerated only in so far as it contributes to the first…“
“At most colleges, the lion’s share of students major in vocational fields: business, communications, education, health. But even at elite institutions, the most popular majors are the practical, or as Brooks might say, the commercial ones: economics, biology, engineering, and computer science.”
“From the Romantics, at the dawn of modernity, all the way through the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, the young were understood to have a special role: to step outside the world and question it. To change it, with whatever opposition from adults. ”
“Youth, now, is nothing more than a preliminary form of adulthood, and the quiet desperation of middle age has been imported backward into adolescence…And as everybody knows by now, it isn’t just postmodern youth; it is also postmodern childhood—for children, too, increasingly are miniature adults, chasing endlessly for rank and status.”
“the liberal arts are those fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake. When you study the liberal arts, I added, what you are principally learning to do is make arguments.”
“law, medicine, finance, consulting, science, and academia… Nor is it an accident that the first four of those (the four that also happen to be lucrative) are the top choices among graduates of the most selective schools.”
“So as college is increasingly understood in terms of job and career, and job and career increasingly mean business, especially entrepreneurship (in this age that idealizes the entrepreneur), students have developed a parallel curriculum for themselves, a parallel college, where they can get the skills they think they really need. Those extracurriculars that students are deserting the classroom for are less and less what Pinker denigrates as “recreational” and more and more oriented toward future employment: entrepreneurial endeavors, nonprofit ventures, various forms of volunteerism and employment. The big thing now on campuses—or rather, off them—is internships.”
“There are a lot of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. But now that kind of contact is increasingly unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else.”
“Neoliberalism disarms us in another sense, as well. For all its talk of freedom and individual initiative, it is remarkably good at inculcating a sense of helplessness. So much of the rhetoric around college today, and so much of the negative response to my suggestion that students worry less about pursuing wealth and more about constructing a sense of purpose for themselves, bespeak the idea that young people, that all people, are the passive objects of economic forces. That they have no agency, no options. That they have to do what the market tells them. A Princeton student literally made this argument to me. If the market is incentivizing me to go to Wall Street, he said, then who am I to argue?”
“The worst thing about “leadership,” the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of “citizenship,” the notion that it should be run by everyone together. Citizenship, not coincidentally—the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society—was long the guiding principle of education in the United States.”
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of public purposes.”
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar society: free, high-quality mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
“The way out of poverty was politics,” he later wrote, “[b]ut to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect (philosophy).”
“Go (pursue a PhD) if you feel that your happiness depends on it, I’d say—it can be a great experience—but be aware of what you’re signing up for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.”
“If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself.”
December 31, 2022
Amazing collection of essays, from sociological to personal, and a lot more in between. Analyzing this generation's sense of loneliness because of social media and devices making us addicted: "If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred instant messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself."
Our loss of actual friendships, comparing them to the romantic and modern era of the definition of that word: "As for the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment to virtue and mutual improvement, that, too, has been lost... We seem to be terribly fragile today. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side - validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us feel good about ourselves."
The loss of value for culture and the humanities, everybody choosing a career so they can get a job as quickly as possible, damaging the next generations of students: "Science speaks to our relationship with the material world, which can be known and mastered. That is what technology is. Culture speaks to our relationship to one another, who cannot be mastered and cannot be known - not, at least, in any stable or final way. That is what society is."
He analyzes the advantages of higher public education, and the fact that it's disappearing: "Public higher education is a bulkwark against hereditary privilege and an engine of social mobility."
The extremes of political correctness: "The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude."
And a bunch of other stuff. The only two essays that didn't do anything for me were about performative dancing, which I could give a frog's fat ass about. But they were well written nontheless, as everything else.
Our loss of actual friendships, comparing them to the romantic and modern era of the definition of that word: "As for the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment to virtue and mutual improvement, that, too, has been lost... We seem to be terribly fragile today. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side - validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us feel good about ourselves."
The loss of value for culture and the humanities, everybody choosing a career so they can get a job as quickly as possible, damaging the next generations of students: "Science speaks to our relationship with the material world, which can be known and mastered. That is what technology is. Culture speaks to our relationship to one another, who cannot be mastered and cannot be known - not, at least, in any stable or final way. That is what society is."
He analyzes the advantages of higher public education, and the fact that it's disappearing: "Public higher education is a bulkwark against hereditary privilege and an engine of social mobility."
The extremes of political correctness: "The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude."
And a bunch of other stuff. The only two essays that didn't do anything for me were about performative dancing, which I could give a frog's fat ass about. But they were well written nontheless, as everything else.
September 25, 2022
As a collection of select essays spanning some 30 years of William Deresiewicz’s career, THE END OF SOLITUDE provides the reader with a thought-provoking journey into the mind of a cultural critic. Essays are grouped by common themes such as higher education, arts, and technology culture.
Deresiewicz’s writing is a pleasure to read, flowing through each piece as he makes his arguments in an approachable tone that invites active participation. It did not feel like he writes to convince the reader that his opinion is “correct.” Instead, it appears as though his intention is to spark contemplation and discussion on behalf of the reader so that they may formulate their own thoughts, whether in agreeance with him or not. As such, this is not a book to rush through but rather allow time for meditation. Despite some of the essay topics not being of optimal interest to me, I still appreciated reading them.
Overall, THE END OF SOLITUDE was well-worth the read. I enjoyed the thought-provoking writing and will likely return to some of the essays for further reflection. I would highly recommend this book to fans of essay collections and those interested in books on culture and society.
Thank you to Henry Holt and Company for the Early Reviewers copy.
Deresiewicz’s writing is a pleasure to read, flowing through each piece as he makes his arguments in an approachable tone that invites active participation. It did not feel like he writes to convince the reader that his opinion is “correct.” Instead, it appears as though his intention is to spark contemplation and discussion on behalf of the reader so that they may formulate their own thoughts, whether in agreeance with him or not. As such, this is not a book to rush through but rather allow time for meditation. Despite some of the essay topics not being of optimal interest to me, I still appreciated reading them.
Overall, THE END OF SOLITUDE was well-worth the read. I enjoyed the thought-provoking writing and will likely return to some of the essays for further reflection. I would highly recommend this book to fans of essay collections and those interested in books on culture and society.
Thank you to Henry Holt and Company for the Early Reviewers copy.
September 16, 2022
The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz I have mixed feelings about how to review this book to readers. I suppose my confusion is related to this book being a collection of essays written by Mr. Deresiewicz which have been published before. As a result, it is not a book that flows but rather starts and stops with each story. The individual essays are well written and cover topics with interesting insight. But I think the book does not lend itself to be read in large “chunks” instead perhaps one essay and then do something else. To me, this is much like why I can not read poetry. This is not “an airplane read” nor in my opinion a book to snuggle down on the couch on a rainy day and enjoy with a glass of wine. Perhaps the book would be better if there was a new explanation of why or what the next essay or two was about. So if you like thoughtful pieces in small bits you will may enjoy this book otherwise I think it is a frustrating read.
January 22, 2024
Some of these essays were really interesting to me, particularly around academia and technology. But in general I think Deresiewicz is a crotchety older white man (he’d hateeee that I called him a ‘white man,’ literally..he talks about how much he hates that phrase) who is sort of self-absorbed and egotistical. There were some essays I straight up skipped because they were either boring or had an annoying tone. So I think this one is a hit or miss.
September 26, 2022
I’m always reluctant to read books that are a collection of essays, but I really enjoyed William’s previous books, so I checked this one out. I absolutely loved this book. Deresiewicz has such fantastic essays and insight on topics like higher education, patriotism, art and so much more. He’s a fantastic writer, and he offers great perspectives on such a wide range of topics. There were a couple essays in the book that didn’t really connect with me personal, but overall, this is one of my fav books in this format. Anyone who reads this will definitely gain some new perspective on a variety of topics, even if they disagree because you can tell how deeply the author’s thought about each topic.
February 9, 2023
The essays about American higher ed were my favorites in this volume, though Deresiewicz also has interesting and poignant insight into new cultural divisions in our apparently democratic culture where anyone (so the story goes) can create. (Can they?)
Maybe this is what brings the two together: from democratization as a good we seem to have gone to a glib instrumentalization of learning and art. Even our own capacity for reflection can be put in a yoke of supposed purpose, lest we think too hard without having something tangible to show for it.
My favorite essay in the volume? Probably "Change Your Mind First: College and the Urge to Save the World" because it captures so many things about how good intentions went very wrong.
Maybe this is what brings the two together: from democratization as a good we seem to have gone to a glib instrumentalization of learning and art. Even our own capacity for reflection can be put in a yoke of supposed purpose, lest we think too hard without having something tangible to show for it.
My favorite essay in the volume? Probably "Change Your Mind First: College and the Urge to Save the World" because it captures so many things about how good intentions went very wrong.
November 24, 2022
There were a few essays in here that I skipped, mostly reviews on subjects (dance) or books/authors that I just am not familiar with enough to appreciate, but overall I found this collection very insightful, thought provoking, even entertaining (although entertaining you doesn't seem to be the author's primary purpose.) His thoughts and feelings on technology/solitude, mass culture vs. "high culture" and "political correctness" were dead on with how I feel (but can't articulate nearly as well as he does), and his insider's viewpoint on academia and higher learning was especially eye-opening.
November 9, 2022
There were many times I had to stop and question if I was smart enough to read this book. But even if I'm not, I'm going to review it anyway! I think my favorite takeaway from this book is that Deresiewicz isn't out to place blame on anyone for how we've lost our ability to be alone in society. He's more musing on how we got here and his own journey along that path, in a pleasant, easy-going voice with just a light, endearing touch of crankiness.
March 27, 2023
I absolutely loved this collection of essays and how it focused on the inherent exploitation of people, even in educational settings. People are not free from the capitalist ideas that run our societies, and though Deresiewicz isn't even openly anti-capitalist, a lot of his ideas on modernization, industrialization and liberalism echo those held by marxist. It's fun to read this book with a Marxist lens.
September 11, 2022
This book is an interesting read. The author offers his views on our culture and society as he sees it. He allows you to see things from a different view that you might already have. He comments on technology and how it has taken away our way of communicating in person. Loneliness is caused by texting and posting on social media. Read this book for an author’s view of culture and society.
September 22, 2022
A collection of essays on everything from entertainment to hipsters to fine arts to higher education/the author's own experience as a professor. A goodly portion of the essays were entertaining/informative, but the "letters" section was a tedious challenge for me.
October 21, 2022
Wonderful collection of essays on a variety of topics. "A Jew in the Northwest" is one of the best essays on life as an American Jew that I have come across. I skipped the essays on modern dance, as I just don't have the interest. But everything else is worth digging into.
August 26, 2022
On everything from technology culture to Judaism, The End of Solitude proved itself both articulate and thought-provoking. My favorite articles, unsurprisingly, were those on higher education, but I also enjoyed many of his other arguments, including that social media has transformed friendship from bilateral relationships to unilaterally speaking to an anonymous crowd and that food connoisseurship has become the new “badge” of socioeconomic status.
In addition to novel analyses, Deresiewicz also does not shy away from controversial topics such as political correctness. Noting that professors, with their increasingly precarious contracts, are now often resorting to self-censorship for fear of violating some unknown or latent code, Deresiewicz laments the extent to which political correctness has stifled challenging conversations on college campuses and I appreciate his encourage in doing so.
That said, I also disagree with some of Deresiewicz’s opinions. For instance, despite asserting that “[cultural] evolution doesn’t take place in a vacuum,” he seemingly believes that art, in contrast, does. As part of his criticism that spurts of “amateur creativity” are now “art,” he announces that “food… is not art,” and to public vitriol. I am no “foodie,” but I do believe that instead of limiting it to the prerogative of traditionally defined artists, art is the result of an exchange among the artist, the product and the audience, making it unjustifiable to reject something as art based on its medium alone.
At the end of the day, The End of Solitude is more than social criticism: it is a love letter to literature, the liberal arts, and a disappearing mindset. It’s not often that you read someone who’s accessible, insightful, AND eloquent. Yet somehow Derewiesicz accomplishes them all.
Thanks Henry Holt for the ARC.
In addition to novel analyses, Deresiewicz also does not shy away from controversial topics such as political correctness. Noting that professors, with their increasingly precarious contracts, are now often resorting to self-censorship for fear of violating some unknown or latent code, Deresiewicz laments the extent to which political correctness has stifled challenging conversations on college campuses and I appreciate his encourage in doing so.
That said, I also disagree with some of Deresiewicz’s opinions. For instance, despite asserting that “[cultural] evolution doesn’t take place in a vacuum,” he seemingly believes that art, in contrast, does. As part of his criticism that spurts of “amateur creativity” are now “art,” he announces that “food… is not art,” and to public vitriol. I am no “foodie,” but I do believe that instead of limiting it to the prerogative of traditionally defined artists, art is the result of an exchange among the artist, the product and the audience, making it unjustifiable to reject something as art based on its medium alone.
At the end of the day, The End of Solitude is more than social criticism: it is a love letter to literature, the liberal arts, and a disappearing mindset. It’s not often that you read someone who’s accessible, insightful, AND eloquent. Yet somehow Derewiesicz accomplishes them all.
Thanks Henry Holt for the ARC.
March 22, 2025
This is a collection of 42 essays on a variety of topics, mostly in the intellectual realm, offered as cultural or societal critic. A couple are brilliant. Others have excerpts that are, if not brilliant, then thought-stimulating. And a few are on topics of no particular interest to me personally, such as ballet or reflections on being Jewish. But always he is controversial (if he were not Jewish himself, surely he would be accused of being antisemitic.) And that is the value of Deresiewicz. He is, as he described Harold Rosenberg, skeptical of thought, but believes in thinking.
And the way to think, he contends, requires solitude, introspection, and independence, which is not what students are being taught or encouraged to develop today. In his time teaching at Yale, “What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could meet. Any test you gave them, they could ace. They were, as one of them put it, ‘excellent sheep’.” Instead, his formula is one that we can all benefit from.
And the way to think, he contends, requires solitude, introspection, and independence, which is not what students are being taught or encouraged to develop today. In his time teaching at Yale, “What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could meet. Any test you gave them, they could ace. They were, as one of them put it, ‘excellent sheep’.” Instead, his formula is one that we can all benefit from.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; always what I have already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It is only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I actually arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often that idea isn't even very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
June 4, 2024
An assortment of essays on a related variety of topics: Contemporary Culture, Higher Education, Social Media, The Arts, Literary Criticism, Jewish Culture. One of the most interesting ones, written in 2022, combines several of these topics in a single penetrating analysis: "Birthrights" is grouped under Jewish culture, and discusses the author's background in a tightly circumscribed Jewish community. But in addition to being about that it is about identity groups, higher education, and the current politics of grievance. This should be required reading for all college students today.
July 6, 2024
As with collections of short stories, there are always those essays issued as part of a collection, which for whatever reason don’t interest every reader. Such was the case here. Nevertheless, this collection fully warrants a five star rating as the vast majority of the essays (particularly those which appeared in the sections Technology Culture and Higher Education ) were stellar and not to be missed. A brain candy feast. I imagine sitting next to the author on a flight from Portland to New York City would be an absolute pleasure.
December 30, 2024
In "The End of Solitude," William Deresiewicz examines how modern technology and social media have eroded the value of solitude. He argues that constant connectivity encourages a culture of performance and external validation, leaving little room for introspection or authentic selfhood. Solitude, once a space for personal growth and creativity, is increasingly rare in a world dominated by digital interaction and a craving for attention. This loss risks diminishing our ability to truly understand ourselves and engage deeply with life.?
constant weirdo shit is dumming us ?
constant weirdo shit is dumming us ?
September 24, 2022
@HenryHoltBooks #TheEndofSolitude What an interesting read! I read a little bit at a time because I wanted to reflect of what the author had to say. Everyone in the USA will find many pertinent things to think about and discuss with friends. Highly recommended. Three other friends read it and then we donated it to the local VA. Thank you.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews