Better Together: Restoring the American Community

Let's get "Better Together":
No matter your interest, religious, political, environment, academic, left, right, or center, if you have interest in seeing things change (or stay the same), Better Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein, with Don Cohen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) is a must read. Better Together tells the stories of twelve different groups: from a community organization to a church, as well as a dance group and a web site, from a union to a branch library, a Fortune 500 corporation and a neighborhood group, to name a few. The stories hold in common the building up of community, of social capital. It is the best book of general interest that I have read in more than a year. Putnam addresses a critical aspect of how we are brought together as citizens and neighbors. I cannot stress enough how highly I recommend this book.

The answer is simple , admit it:
( women have left the home and family and gone to work!) ((( Insert this every other sentence! ))) figuring out the problem is not hard, its admitting it. ( hint, dont kneejerk and yell hate and sexist, this is a woman writing, who stays home with the kids and whose own mom stayed home with the kids, rem those days? the 60's? oh gee why has everything changed?! you know the answer, just admit it. A sense of community We know all about the women who live along Wisteria Lane, but not what's going on with the people who live on our own street. We instant message with strangers around the world while hardly talking to the neighbor next door. We know the middle names of celebrity children, though we have no idea who the kid across the street is. It's the American way, or perhaps the demise of the American way. Fewer people know their neighbors, a decline that's been occurring since the late 1960s, according to the book "Better Together: Restoring the American Community," (Simon & Schuster, $15, 336 pages) by Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein. ( women have left the home and family and gone to work!) Since that time, social clubs, civic associations, participation in public affairs and time spent with family, friends and neighbors have all dropped by 25 percent to 50 percent, according to the book. ( women have left the home and family and gone to work!) And the average American has friends over to dinner about 45 percent less than in the 1970s, according to another of Putnam's books, "Bowling Alone" (Simon & Schuster, $16 paperback, 554 pages). ( women have left the home and family and gone to work!) "It does seem to be the kind of thing we have lodged in the collective imagination where the Cleaver family has barbecues with the neighbors," says Kevin Wehr, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento. "That just seems to be not really the case anymore." ( women have left the home and family and gone to work!) Busy schedules, a more transient society all contribute to declining neighborliness, experts have found. ( women have left the home and family and gone to work!)

Good portrait of people working together:
Robert Putnam dissected what might be the fraying of American community in "Bowling Alone". Here he and co-authors Lewis Feldstein and Don Cohen look at 12 examples of community. It's quite interesting to see how, for example, branch libraries became social hubs in Chicago. The vignette of CraigsList is dated only a few years later and, in any event, it is difficult to accept CraigsList as as true example of community. It may have been in its earliest days, but is certainly not now. The depiction of Portland may be a bit blindsided in that Portland's activists seem to be against anything and everything, more like Babbit's than enablers of any kind. On the whole, though, it's an interesting collection of community endeavors. Not truly a complement to "Bowling Alone", but rather a standalone effort. Jerry