Going Solo - Eric Klinenberg

 Sub-title: The extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone

I started reading this sometime back in 2020 and struggled to get through it but finally finished in August 2021.  The author did field research on people living alone in developed countries and interprets the results for their impact on future housing, urban living, and society as a whole.  

Quotes:

"In 1917...the writer Anna Alice Chapin identified a building nearby as "the first all-bachelor apartment house erected in town.  It is appropriately called 'the Benedick' [from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing], after a certain young man who scoffed at matrimony."

"The big thing that changes with age in terms of living alone is that the word 'dying' and 'alone' start to become associated with each other...nobody worries about dying married."

"...a deputy investigator for the Los Angeles County Public Administrator...is one of a hundred full-time employees at the county public administrator's office, which investigates cases in which someone dies and no one claims the body or the estate.  She is sort of like a detective for people who die alone.  Her job is to comb through the remains of their lives, searching for next of kin.  Emily and her colleagues get about 3,000 cases like this each year."

"Pearl is a prototype for a robotic personal assistant, with origins in a collaborative research and design experiment...at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities."

Published: 2010  Read: August 2021  Genre: Non-fiction, sociology