Bowling Alone
No, this book isn’t about bowling. It’s about community, or rather the lack of it in America. The subtitle of the book is “The Collapse and Revival of American Community”, but, it is really more about the collapse of community (or as the author refers to it: “social capital”). The revival is just a small portion of recommendations at the end.
In the first section, the book details with a lot of statistics the overall decline of community in America over the last century. This was a bit tedious. I probably could have skipped this entire portion, as I didn’t need to be sold on these facts.
The second section covers the “why” of the decline of American community. The two largest culprits are television and urban sprawl – no kidding. It corroborates my thoughts on television – it’s evil. People spend so much time in their cars or watching TV it is really sickening.
Finally, the book lists why the decline in community is so detrimental to us. The lack of community hurts our participation in democracy and our overall health and happiness, among other things.
The book is pretty good, although the author was “preaching to the choir” with me. There were a few more charts, graphs, and stats then I care for. If this topic is not something you think much about, it will probably open your eyes to a few things. However, if you already already are cognizant of the impact things like commuting and excessive television veiwing, I don’t think you’ll find too many new insights.
