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Title :

Seek you : a journey through American loneliness / Kristen Radtke.

Title:

Seek you :

Author:

Radtke, Kristen

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

352 pages : chiefly color illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

ISBN:

9781524748067

Production / Publication Information:

New York : Pantheon Books, [2021]

Summary:

"When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into a piercing exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another. She looks at the very real current crisis of loneliness through the lenses of gender, violence, technology, and art. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to Instagram to Harry Harlow's experiments in which infant monkeys were given inanimate surrogate mothers, Radtke uncovers all she can about how we engage with friends, family, and strangers alike, and what happens--to us and to them--when we disengage. With her distinctive, emotionally charged drawings and unflinchingly sharp prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully reframes some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments"--

Language:

English

Genre:

Nonfiction comics.

Graphic novels.

Subject Term:

Loneliness -- Comic books, strips, etc.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	GRAPHIC RADTKE	31330009051594	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Amesbury Public Library	GRAPHIC RADTKE	32114002661446	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Billerica Public Library	GRAPHIC/RADTKE	33934004415270	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Boxford Town Library	AGN RADTKE	32115002138194	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Burlington Public Library	GN RADTKE	32116003810997	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library	GRAPHIC RADTKE	32117002085649	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	GRAPHIC/SEEK	31480011485643	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library	ADULT GRAPHIC/RADTKE	31482002948423	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library	741.5973 RAD	32118001051293	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	GN RADTKE	32120001367802	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groton Public Library	GN 155.92 RAD	37003701858988	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library	A/GN RADTKE	30470001920007	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	GRAPHIC NOVEL/RADTKE K	31479007479420	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Ipswich Public Library	GN 155.92 RADTKE	32122002927899	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	155.92 RAD GRAPHIC	31549004887252	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library	GRAPHIC 155.92 RAD	31481005572347	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library	GRAPHIC NOVEL SEE	32124002044659	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library	ADULT GRAPHIC 741.5 RAD	31548003362143	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	GRAPHIC 155.92 RADTKE	31478010178276	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library	ADULT GRAPHIC / RADTKE	31550002478599	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	155.92 RADTKE (GRAPHIC)	32129002456431	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Tewksbury Public Library	ADULT GRAPHIC 155.92 RAD	32132003329847	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library	ADULT GRAPHIC RAD	32135001531496	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library	GRAPHIC NOVEL SEEK	32136002872442	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library	TEEN GRAPHIC RADTKE	32136003502956	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This-- a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society.

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.

In Seek You , Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share.

Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

As Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) notes at the outset of this gripping graphic investigation, she had no way of knowing, when she began researching isolation in 2016, how on-trend her topic would become. Combining personal narrative with social science, evolutionary biology, and pop culture analysis, Radtke's work is innovative in form and painfully relevant in content. People who are socially isolated die sooner in numbers that cannot be explained simply by slip-and-falls or unchecked vices, she notes. "We need to feel deeply troubled when we observe minor social shuns so we can correct our behavior," she says, drawing convincing lines from loneliness to totalitarianism (citing Hannah Arendt) and mass shootings. She devotes a large section to Harry Harlow, whose famous studies of baby rhesus monkeys' need for affection contradicted early 20th-century messaging that cuddling one's children was unhygienic. Radtke's astute observations about social media implicate herself yet extend gentleness to her fellow lonely humans. (For example, Radtke recounts looking down on selfie-takers at an art exhibit only to end up taking one herself.) Somber illustrations range from journalistic to starkly symbolic, in variations on gray that establish a flat and lonely world, making the gradient sunset hues that sometimes burst through that much brighter. As a montage of people's faces blends together, the effect enacts the book's hopeful thesis that loneliness can be a catalyst for connection. For a treatise about the perils of being alone, it creates a wonderful sense of being drawn into conversation. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (July)

Kirkus Review

An exploration of loneliness, the troubling ways we've studied it, and the subtle ways we strain to avoid it. Radtke's second graphic memoir feels almost custom-made for the social-distancing era: She explores our need for connection and touch ("skin hunger" is the psychological term) and the negative social and personal effects of isolation. But the book is a much broader and deeply affecting study of loneliness, uncovering the host of ways our craving for community manifests itself in ways that are sometimes quirky and sometimes terrifying. Laugh tracks on sitcoms, for instance, offer a sense of communal feeling within a cold medium; so, too, did the Web 1.0 sites and chatrooms Radtke obsessed over, where strangers laid out their private thoughts and fears. The anxiety runs deep: We crave reports of mass shooters that say the perpetrator was a loner because it satisfies our need to not associate with them. "The collective branding of mass killers is a clumsy act of self-preservation," she writes. In clean, graceful renderings and a constricted color palette, Radtke expresses her own experiences with loneliness, as a child and in relationships, and gets people to open up about theirs. Along the way, she discovered unusual approaches to combatting loneliness--e.g., a hotline that elderly people can call to have someone to talk to. The author also writes about the cruel experiments psychologist Harry Harlow conducted on monkeys in the 1950s to debunk the belief that children shouldn't be emotionally coddled. Harlow himself lived a troubled, isolated life, and Radtke wonders if he projected his anxiety upon the animals he tormented in the name of science. If so, how much of our own fear of isolation do we project on the world? Throughout, Radtke is an engaging and thoughtful guide through our fear of being alone. Superb. A rigorous, vulnerable book on a subject that is too often neglected. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

In some ways an extension of her acclaimed graphic novel debut, Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), which explored ideas of decay and its aftermath, Radtke's second work of wide-ranging, visual nonfiction storytelling examines isolation as a social, biological, and personal phenomenon. The hard-to-define concept of loneliness, Radtke writes, "is a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want." In graphic-essay style, Radtke centers her inquiry around four human behaviors--listen, watch, click, and touch--and devotes rich, meandering chapters to each. "Listen," for instance, ponders the TV laugh track, invented because humans are less likely to laugh alone. "Watch" moves from the American obsession with a certain "cowboy sensibility" to a spread filled with real headlines describing the perpetrators of mass shootings as "loners." For "Click," Radtke posits that the much-maligned exaggeration social media encourages existed in all the technological advances before it, and "Touch" contemplates the life and experiments of Harry Harlow, who tested the often devastating limits of estrangement in baby monkeys. In a limited palette of black, blues, and peaches, Radtke's crisp, vector-drawn illustrations more than hint at reality; rather, in their layering and arrangement, they seem to reproduce it in truer, more emotional detail. Provocative and companionable, this will spark conversation and, undoubtedly, connection among readers.

Library Journal Review

"When I started writing this book in 2016," writes Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) at the beginning of this timely volume, "rates of loneliness had already been increasing exponentially for decades, yet it wasn't a subject I heard people talk about very often, at least not in relation to themselves." In often poetic prose accompanied by stunning illustration, Radtke weaves together personal anecdotes and examples drawn from physical and mental health studies to create a meditation on the causes and cost of isolation. A brief history of the television sitcom laugh track segues into a reflection on the comedies Radtke watched as a child and how they shaped her understanding of love and friendship, which leads to a discussion of the health issues associated with prolonged loneliness and then an explanation of how American media glorifies loners such as Mad Men's Don Draper. Later, an examination of social rejection as a source of aggression and irrationality prefaces revelations about Radtke's personal relationships, an analysis of the popularity of artist Yayoi Kusama, and thoughts on social media and parenthood. VERDICT An insightful and compassionate investigation of loneliness, which Radke convincingly calls "one of the most universal things any person can feel."