Review by Choice Review
Sociologist Klinenberg (New York Univ.) notes that more people live alone in the US than ever before, a quarter of all households. He became interested in the frail elderly who live alone when they died in large numbers in the Chicago heat wave that was the subject of his earlier book (Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, CH, Mar'03, 40-4319). Here he has the most detail on younger, financially secure people who can afford to live alone, especially in New York City. These are the strongest sections of this study. However, Klinenberg does not make a compelling case that the various kinds of singles--the young urban premarried, the frail elderly, the divorced, the gay, ex-cons, drug addicts--add up to a coherent social group. He is especially unpersuasive in contending that living alone is destined to become the dominant form of social life, and that proponents of marriage are fighting a rear-guard action for an anachronistic sociability. The book is surprisingly short of numbers for a sociological work. The author's policy prescriptions, as is common in this genre, yearn for a Swedish-style welfare state that would pay for solo living as a social right. Summing Up: Recommended. General collections/public libraries. B. Weston Centre College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SO these two sociologists go into a bar and the man says to the woman, "What have you been up to?" "I've been studying what I call 'accordion families,'" she says. "Right now something like three and a half million American parents are sharing a house with adult kids who've either come back home or never left." "You want to talk about trends?" the man counters. "Did you know that aside from childless couples the most common household type in America is an adult living alone? That's one out of seven adults, over 30 million people." Wishing to avoid an argument, the sociologists appeal to the bartender. Which trend seems more significant to him? "Beats me," he says, "but I liked this place a lot better when the customers were political economists." It's not funny, I know, but it's not the punch line, either. That comes when the two sociologists I have in mind - Katherine S. Newman of Johns Hopkins University, the author of "The Accordion Family," and Eric Klinenberg of New York University, the author of "Going Solo" - conclude their fascinating studies with a nod each to the bartender. Except by then they're no longer in a bar; they're in Sweden. We'll get to that. First let's look at those so-called accordion families, which Newman evaluates both as a transnational phenomenon and in the nuanced particulars of individual households. Like Klinenberg, she devotes a good portion of her book to personal interviews, but where Klinenberg goes deep in his emphasis on the United States, Newman goes wide. At the extreme end of her analysis is a country like Italy, where 37 percent of 30-year-old men live with their parents, and have never lived anywhere else. Less striking but certainly notable is a parallel trend in the United States, where a higher proportion of adult children now live with parents than at any time since the 1950s. Newman states her thesis plainly: "Global competition is the most profound structural force affecting the residential location of young adults in the developed world (or the underdeveloped world, for that matter)" - but one is impressed by her refusal to turn thesis into dogma. She acknowledges that different cultures define adulthood in different ways, with Americans tending to see it as "a process of self-discovery" and Europeans as "a station defined by the way one relates to others." She also appreciates the mutual benefits of multigenerational households, as suggested by a survey showing that 76 percent of American parents of 21-year-olds say they feel close to their child, as opposed to a mere quarter of their own parents saying the same. Still, Newman does not shy away from the larger effects of a child's "failure to launch," independently, into the world. Not the least of these is a generation's failure to generate. At present there are four workers in Europe for every pensioner; by 2050 there will be only two workers for every retiree. Birthrates in the United States would also be falling if not for Mexican immigrants - yet another job they've taken on, along with those of lawn- and elder-care and favored scapegoat. But Ln Japan, the fastest-aging country in the world, where only 1 percent of the population is foreign-born, the future looks more bleak. Newman also takes pains to show how accordion families shape up across class lines - the difference between an upper-middle-class family providing rent-free space to a child earning a law degree and a subsistence family hanging on to a child in order to make the rent. Part of this difference is that "working-class kids do not boomerang back into the family home" but "like their Spanish or Italian counterparts . . . do not leave home at all until much later in life." NEWMAN'S class consciousness is no less pronounced in Klinenberg, who maintains it at far greater risk to his argument. Where Newman views her subject with qualified concern, Klinenberg is more celebratory about "going solo," which he tends to see as "a remarkable social experiment" on the part of over 200 million adults worldwide (a 33 percent increase in the decade between 1996 and 2006). "For the first time in human history, great numbers of people . . . have begun settling down as singletons," a development rich with "new possibilities for our personal, romantic and social lives," and a potential corrective to the "hypernetworked, ultraactive, 24/7 culture" of the World Wide Mind. But just when a reader might grow restive hearing the testimonies of entrepreneurial singletons in pristine health, Klinenberg takes us on a Dantean tour of S.R.O.'s (single-room-occupancy hotels) and nursing homes, some of which, like those in New York, "lie in the shadows of the most safe and prosperous communities on earth." Here he shows us the terrors of languishing, ailing and dying alone. Klinenberg can make going solo look sexy, but "Sex and the City" this ain't. Taking issue with Joseph Schumpeter, who saw late capitalism's "disintegration of the bourgeois family" as part of a broader "decomposition" of collective life, Klinenberg nevertheless exemplifies Schumpeter's famous definition of a "civilized man" (in distinction to a "barbarian") as one who recognizes the "relative validity" of his "convictions" while being able to "stand for them unflinchingly." On those terms, Klinenberg is a civilized man indeed. His only false note for this reader - though hardly an exception to his civility - is his willingness to give serious consideration to the use of robots as companions for the aged. But even here his intelligence allows him no more than a formal bow ("By the time the current generation of young adults reaches old age, their comfort with machines will make robotic companions even more attractive") as opposed to the groveling prostration often observed in the presence of the All-High Tech. With unassailable judgment he says that "questions raised by critics" like me "should be directed at all of us, not merely at artificial intelligence researchers." The same might be said of the issues raised by social researchers - and Klinenberg says it. "The extraordinary rise of living alone is not in itself a social problem," he insists. "But it is a dramatic social change that's already exacerbating serious problems for which there are no easy solutions: Social isolation for the elderly and frail. Reclusiveness for the poor and vulnerable. Self-doubt for those who worry that going solo will leave them childless, or unhappy, or alone." In searching out possible solutions, he takes us to alternative housing experiments like New York City's Common Ground, where formerly homeless residents live as neighbors to "the working poor, including aspiring actors and artists and a variety of blue-collar laborers." He also takes us to Sweden. The country interests Klinenberg for what he finds there - 47 percent of households with one occupant, as opposed to 28 percent in the United States - just as it interests Newman for what she doesn't find there: namely, a large enough incidence of accordion families to count as a phenomenon. In fact, Newman sees a direct correlation between a country's proportion of adult children living at home and the frailty of its social safety net with the Scandinavian social democracies having the least incidence and the weak welfare states of Spain, Italy and Japan the greatest "'All for one and one for all - because no one else is looking out for any of us' might as well be the motto" for families "in the laissez-faire countries of the developed world," she writes, referring to the family as "the welfare state of the first resort." In Sweden the welfare state does not uve over the family garage. The high number of Swedes who leave home at age 18 is doubtless the result of social policies that provide affordable housing for single people, subsidized tuition and housing for students, and support for parents that obviates what many American women see as an unavoidable choice between motherhood and career. (Sweden boasts not only one of the highest birthrates per woman in Europe, but also one of the highest percentages of women in the work force in the world.) The high cost of housing frequently cited by young adults as the main obstacle to independence is much less formidable for the young Swede. In other words, as Newman says: "The choice of the 'accordion solution' is political, even if it doesn't feel like it. Americans could decide to go the way of the social democracies, placing the burden of youth independence on the state and hence on all taxpaying shoulders. Or we can slice deep, right to the fiscal bone, and cut the deficit by taking away those supports that enable whatever independence or transitional time we provide for young adults." This can be read as a starkly specific answer to a rhetorical question that Klinenberg poses near the end of his book, and implicitly throughout it: "What if, instead of indulging the social reformer's fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition?" As he points out repeatedly, those hazards can befall any of us, especially when going solo chooses us instead of the other way around. We cannot count on death not to take the ones we count on. What both authors strongly imply is that our debates about the family, which are nothing if not debates about how people take care of one another, are nothing indeed if we lack the collective political will to take care of one another in the fullest sense. Klinenberg and Newman flesh out their subjects with expertise and devotion, but neither forgets that "accordion family" and "going solo" are always less definitive terms than rich and poor. Should they walk into any bar where I happen to be sitting, their drinks are on me. 'For the first time in human history,' Klinenberg writes, great numbers of people are 'settling down as singletons.' Garret Keizer is the author of "The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise." His latest work, "Privacy," will be published in August.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Singletons people who choose to live alone are getting more numerous. Roughly 31 million Americans live alone. That's one out of seven adults, and you should keep in mind that Americans are, overall, less likely to live alone than people in many other countries. This rather interesting book addresses several questions, among them why people choose to live alone, why singletons are on the rise, whether living alone is a key part of maturing, whether singletons enjoy better mental health than their cohabiting counterparts, and whether living alone necessarily makes someone an introvert (studies and Klinenberg cites many indicate that people who live alone can be enthusiastically social animals). The prose is lively, focusing more on personal stories than dry statistics, and by treating living alone as a social phenomenon, Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is able to draw some startling conclusions about our behavior.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tackling the growing phenomenon of living alone, sociologist Klinenberg (Heat Wave) examines the roots of the trend in the modern cult of the individual, the feminist liberation from the "burden of the `women's role' in marriage," and the Greenwich Village bohemians of the early 20th century. Now, with divorce rates soaring and employment stability at a low, Westerners have gotten used to moving fluidly among cities, jobs, and partners, putting off marriage. At the same time, young people have reframed solo dwelling as a first step into adult independence, shaking some of its old stigma. Klinenberg portrays a number of young urban professionals who enjoy the good life and stay hyperconnected through social media; middle-aged divorces with little faith in marriage and a fierce desire to protect their independence; widows and widowers forging new networks in assisted living facilities. On the flip side of the coin are the isolated and the poor, homebound by disabilities, forced into single-room occupancy dwellings by poverty, addiction, or disease. With such wide-ranging lifestyles, singletons often find it hard to band together to promote their social and political causes. Still, they share a number of common difficulties, and Klinenberg takes an optimist's look at how society could make sure singles-young and old, rich and poor-can make the connections that support them in their living spaces and beyond. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
John Donne ("No man is an island") and evidence of the "marriage advantage" to the contrary, Klinenberg (sociology, New York Univ.; Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago) paints a compelling picture of the new trend toward "singletons." Not much has been written about the fact that more than 50 percent of Americans are now single, with 28 percent of the population (mostly women) actually living alone. Klinenberg identifies four circumstances that have allowed this to happen: recognition of women's rights; vastly improved communication systems; the growth of cities; and longer life spans. Where solitary time and exile were once considered punishments, people on their own today enjoy the personal and intellectual satisfactions that come from being self-reliant-something Emerson and Thoreau recognized centuries ago. VERDICT With articles in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Slate and appearances on the radio program This American Life, Klinenberg is at ease in both scholarly and popular milieus, and his book is recommended for libraries and individuals in both worlds.-Ellen Gilbert, Princeton, NJ (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, 2007, etc.) explores why "more than 50 percent of American adults are single"--and why the usually prefer to live that way. Solo living appears to be a global phenomenon that has skyrocketed over the past decade. The author examines both ends of the age spectrum in an attempt to understand the social implication of this trend. He finds that among relatively affluent young adults in the 25-to-34 age bracket, living solo is seen as a rite of passage into adulthood--a period allowing more sexual freedom, a chance to explore relationships without commitment and a major focus on career building. A similar increase in solitary living is becoming the norm among the elderly, where one in three people over 65 live alone--compared to one in 10 in 1950. This book is an outgrowth of a study conducted by Klinenberg following the publication of his book Heat Wave (2003), which investigated the tragic deaths of senior citizens during the extraordinary heat wave in Chicago in 1995. Interviewing elderly Manhattan residents who live alone, the author found that they preferred this to dependence on their children because of their strong belief in self-reliance. They reject the alternative of assisted living as prohibitively expensive and deplore the conditions in most nursing homes. Klinenberg suggests that public support is needed to provide affordable, urban assisted-living facilities in which the elderly can maintain their independence for as long as possible. An optimistic look at shifting social priorities that need not threaten our fundamental values.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
