The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

The nation’s rich and varied social fabric is wearing dangerously thin, according to this perceptive but unfocused tome. Journalist and Clinton Foundation fellow Dunkelman rues the erosion of America’s traditional social base in “townships”—diverse, neighborly communities where different classes, ethnicities, and political stripes joined to solve problems collaboratively. With mass prosperity, liberal lifestyles, and the rise of social networking, he contends, we have devolved into a narcissistic society of self-actualizers who live within a homogeneous “inner ring” of intimates and “outer ring” of Facebook friends and blog coteries. All manner of sociopolitical dysfunctions flow from the atrophy of the “middle ring” of diverse township affiliations, he concludes, such as slowing technological innovation, the growing isolation of oldsters, and Washington gridlock. Dunkelman’s treatise mines sources from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities to reach a rich and accessible diagnosis of contemporary mores and discontents. However, the vital-centrist core of his argument, with its finely graded but indistinct rings, feels hollow and weakly supported (for example, a languishing neighborliness statistic: corner bar attendance has declined from 19% to 14% since the mid-1970s). The result is yet another sociological come-together exhortation that’s more fretful than compelling. (July)