RSSBowling Alone
September 23rd, 2005 | View Comments
Author: Robert Putnam
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: 
Buy Bowling Alone on Amazon.com
The topic of social change and civic engagement is one that is infinitely interesting to me, so you’d think that I wouldn’t have gotten so bored by this book. In his effort to be as thorough as possible in making his point, Putnam completely forgot about things like narrative structure (which, yes, nonfiction books should still have some semblance of narrative structure).
I’m warning y’all: this sucker is a dense, dry read. It’s like medicine. You know it’s good for you, but man, is it not fun to take. So you go off them for a while, until something happens and you start taking them again. It’s literally taken me years to finish this book. If you’re going to take this one on, be sure to put your statistics thinking caps on, because Putnam is kind of regression-happy.
It would appear that Putnam’s idea of effective persuasion is to bludgeon you with data, and then to bury you under even more data. He wins the debate when you become too weak to speak, or die. I mean, we are talking 100 pages of appendix, people, and that’s just the stuff that he thought was important, but too nitpicky to fit into the body of the book.
This book would be twice as effective in making its rather thought-provoking point, if only it were a third of its size.
Putnam devotes the first part of the book to establishing the decline of civic engagement and social capital in the United States. He covers all the bases from political and religions participation, to volunteering and philanthropy, to informal social gatherings. All are on the decline.
Then he seeks to find the cause of this decline, fingering generational change as the big one (Baby Boomers and X/Yers just don’t care as much about community), but also laying a goodly chunk of the blame on urban sprawl and mass media, particularly tv.
And then he tells us why we should care. The answer is that everything starts to go south when civic engagement goes south, from education to healthcare to the state of our government. From an editorial standpoint, I really think that this section should have come first, then he should have established the decline, and then determined its causes.
And then finally, FINALLY! He gets to what I consider to be the most important part—what we can do about the decline. Unfortunately, after the epic of data that came before it, the scant 50 pages devoted to this topic seem almost an afterthought. Putnam gives us ideas on how to increase social capital that seem reasonable, but utterly uninspiring. On the other hand, you’re also left with a sense of wistfulness. This book was published in August 2001, and had any of the leaders of this country paid attention to its message back then, they might not have squandered a rare moment of national unity in order to play party politics.
My recommendation is to read as much of the first few sections as you can stomach, then skip ahead to the last two chapters.
Buy Bowling Alone on Amazon.com
Yvonne posted this on September 23rd, 2005 @ 2:29am in Book Reviews | Permalink to "Bowling Alone"
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