Description:What if Bill Bryson wrote a Malcolm Gladwell book, one that took the science of loneliness and used it as the travel guide for an epic comic adventure through friendship? Billy Baker's We Need to Hang Out is the story of a middle-aged everyman who realizes that he doesn't have any close friends, inspiring him to set out on a humorous and ultimately moving quest to revive old tribes and build new ones, all with the goal of having someone to hang out with on Wednesday nights.
Almost fifty million Americans over the age of forty-five suffer from chronic loneliness, which the surgeon general has declared one of the nation's "greatest pathologies," worse than smoking, obesity, or heart disease in increasing a person's risk for premature death. Yet this serious health epidemic remains largely invisible, as loneliness is a condition few are willing to admit to. Now, in We Need to Hang Out, Billy Baker embraces this taboo topic with candid humor and no shame,...