[.ca] Urban Tribes (ISBN 1582344418)

kind of insulting:
I felt duped. This book is not about "urban tribes" so much as the author, a newly married father writing about his playboy days and the friends he used for emotional support. As a character, he seems superficially charming and not enough flawed. His attempts at self-deprecation amuse but are too shallow to fully engage. As a memoir, the book lacks honesty and universality. As social science, it lacks science. Too bad - the subject deserves some depth.

don't believe the hype:
By the time the reader realizes that Urban Tribes doesn't even merit the genre "pop-sociology", he/she is sucked into the narrative of Ethan Watters' personal quest for meaning. The first several chapters explore human social behaviour in a form that many young adults are familiar with. With self-congratulatory tones, we read about how our post-college lifestyles have been beneficial not just to ourselves, but to the world. I, for one, wasn't concerned about whether or not my lifestyle had meaning and had never sought to prove its worth. This author, however, was clearly very concerned about the merit of his choices and uses the first half of the book to demonstrate that the Urban Tribe lifestyle is both steeped in human sociology and a novel way to deal with the vagaries of singlehood in the early twenty-first century. Even this section, while peppered with statistics, consists mainly of anecdotal evidence. The second half of the book descends into personal narrative. Although I did find it quite amusing, Ethan's exploration of male/female relationships as they pertained mostly to himself and his friends did not as I saw it further the message of the earlier part of the book. I laughed as Ethan attempted to navigate various pop-psychology theories about mating, particularly when he tried to convince his friends that evolutionary psychology should dictate the rules of the game. Then there is his analysis of the latest dating advice books, such as The Rules. I hadn't realized that anyone had taken them seriously, but there was an astonishing amount of articles pressuring women to marry. It is all very entertaining. At the end, as Ethan describes his happy marriage and the transition from tribe-life to married-life, I felt dissatisfied. If this was to be a book about the Urban Tribe, it should not have become a book about marriage. If this was a book about marriage, why muddy it with the concept of Urban Tribes? In the beginning, he takes great care to describe how the "never-marrieds" of his generation are much more than single people, and how they are forging a new type of life for the coming century. However, his ending reveals that he too believes that marriage is the eventual goal for all people. I don't have a problem with marriage, but I think he lost his way on his own argument. In summary, this book contains a great introduction to the Urban Tribes concept, followed by a very funny personal narrative about dating, and ends with an analysis of marriage in our times. I cannot say it was a good book, but if I had read each of its parts individually, I would have said I enjoyed them all.

Urban Tribes:
I appreciated Watters' candid explanation of how his 'concept' of urban tribes was constantly shifting, evolving, and changing (sometimes even to the point of direct contradiction with his earlier hypotheses) the more he tried to define what an 'urban tribe' was. The book offers a quick paced and interesting read for those interested in cultural anthropology, or are just curious to discover more about how friends and social networking "tribes" have become the new tribe of young Gen-Xers.

Shallow pop sociology:
This is a book that started out as a magazine piece and probably should have stayed there. It's sloppily edited, repetitive and presents a grab bag of anecdotes as if it were a serious analysis of social trends. It's an attempt at social science without the science. While the title concept is appealing and has some promise--I can think of "urban tribes" that I know of--it's the execution of this concept that is disappointing. While the book is entertaining at times, it's not based on much. And, sadly, the author seems to buy in to the notion that singles in their 20's and 30's are just biding their time until the inevitable: marriage. He pays almost no attention to people who don't desire marriage, or to gays and lesbians who may want to get married but can't. Although the phrase "urban tribe" conveys a certain cutting-edge hipness, Watters' underlying premises are about as square as they come. How sad to think that time with friends is just a means of marking time until one gets married, or that being single in one's late 20's or 30's should be a cause for desparation or angst. I'd like to think that marriages/serious partnerships and meaningful, lifelong friendships can co-exist more harmoniously than Watters implies.

I wish I could give this book MINUS 3-star review!:
The fact that this book got published defies comprehension. It's poorly written, the author is completely unlikable and self-absorbed, and it's supremely repetitive. After suffering through so many pages, I realize that this is just another example of a media company wanting to cash in on a trendy catch phrase: "Urban Tribes." It suckered me. Please, don't let it sucker you.