Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
My Way
By Alan Ryan
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
by Robert D. Putnam
Simon and Schuster, 541 pp., $26.00
Bowling Alone is a rich, dense, thoughtful, and fascinating book. It will surely be much talked about, and it deserves to be. It is extremely readable—and not merely by the rather low standards of academic political science; and it is packed with provocative information about the social and political habits of twentieth-century Americans. The rise and fall of Boy Scout organizations, volunteer fire companies, PTAs, and just about every other social, political, and pressure group that has been founded, has flourished, and has declined or expired over the past hundred and twenty years are charted in great detail. Just about every explanation for their ups and downs that a rational person might imagine is canvassed, analyzed, and shown to be not quite adequate.
Review, 5389 words
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