Robert D. Putnam - Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Praise for Bowling Alone

An ambitious book Bowling Alone is a prodigious achievement. Mr. Putnams scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny.

The Economist

An important work that is likely to be the center of much debate Books of sociological insight as readable and significant as David Reismans Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Millss Power Elite come along seldom. Putnams work belongs in their company.

Kirkus Reviews

Putnam can be fliply hip. But mainly he is learned. The book is responsible, intricate, and balanced full of convincing detail.

Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

Deserves to be compared to such classic works as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society.

John Atlas, Newark Star-Ledger

Its four hundred pages are crammed with statistics and analyses that seek to document civic decline in the United States. Bowling Alone is to be commended for stimulating awareness of civic engagement and providing a wealth of data on trends in contemporary America.

Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post

A mountainous, momentous work This is no professorial popgun attempting the crossover from classroom to mass market; it is an antitank gun of an argument, relentlessly researched and heavily armored against academic counterassault. A fabric of stunning comprehensiveness. [Putnams] put his finger on an important sociological development.

David Nyhan, The Boston Globe

In this alarming and important study, Putnam charts the grievous deterioration over the past two generations of the organized ways in which people relate to one another and partake in civil life in the U.S. Marshalling a plentiful array of facts, figures, charts, and survey results, Putnam delivers his message with verve and clarity [and offers] a ray of hope in what he perceives to be a dire situation.

Publishers Weekly

A formidable book There is no place, in my knowledge, where so much about the current disconnectedness of American society has been uncovered, assembled, and presented as in the text, charts, and notes within [Bowling Alone].

Curtis Gans, Washington Monthly

The strength of Putnams book is not its theoretical or conceptual novelty but its accumulation and sifting of data. [Putnam] lays out with considerable precision and far more subtlety than he has yet been given credit for, the trends in civic engagement and social capital in all aspects of life.

James Davison Hunter, The Weekly Standard

A powerful sociological portrait of a democracy in imminent declinea portrait as perspicacious, deeply felt, and firmly rooted in data as the classic American portraits rendered in The Lonely Crowd.Bowling Alone is a modern classic: a model of fastidious, prudent, self critical social science that manages to be data-rich without being theory-averse, scholarly yet undeniably relevant.

Benjamin Barber, The Nation

Bowling Alone provides important new data on the trends in civic engagement and social capital, a revised analysis of the causes of the decline, an exploration of its consequences, and ideas about what might be done. The book will not settle the debate, but it is a formidable achievement. It will henceforth be impossible to discuss these issues knowledgeably without reading Putnams book and thinking about it.

Paul Starr, The New Republic

Bowling Alone is well worth the reading. The topic is important, and the passion infectious. Putnam gets you thinking about the challenges to community in a high-tech economy.

Christopher Farrell, BusinessWeek

Bowling Alone [is] a singularly valuable beta test for anyone thinking about applying the idea of social capital to other problems. This is powerful stuff. Indeed, in the wrong handsthose of a purple haired refugee from Seattle demonstrations, perhaps it could be used to make an inflammatory case against corporate America.

Walter Kiechel, Harvard Business Review

A provocative discussion. [Putnam] shows us the real problems and offers some broad-based goals that will help us to connect better with one another.

Inc. Magazine

This book deserves a wide audience. It deals seriously and imaginatively with one of the most urgent problems of our time.

Sanford D. Horwitt, The Industry Standard

Robert Putnams Bowling Alone is an eloquent and powerful contribution to a long tradition of important reassessments of the American condition. His argumentbuttressed by impressive scholarly researchthat the United States has lost much of the social glue that once allowed our society to cohere, that we are in danger of becoming a nation of strangers to one another without adequate social bonds, is certain to become a central part of our national conversation.

Alan Brinkley, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents

A marvelously researched and well written book Putnam does a splendid job of explaining our loss of social capital [and] has written an extremely provocative bookone that provides a penetrating insight into the modern American psyche.

Howard Upton, Tulsa World

Plainly argued and compulsively readable [Bowling Alone] is an agenda-setting book that will be the starting point of discussion and debate for years to come.

Mark Chaves, The Christian Century

Bowling Alone is a tour de force. Robert Putnam has amassed an impressive array of evidence for his original and powerful thesis on the decline of social capital and civic engagement in the past several decades. This thought-provoking book will stimulate huge academic and national public policy debates on the crisis of the American community.

William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

Robert Putnams Bowling Alone is a must-read.

Diane Ravitch, author of Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms

Whether you agree with the central thesis of Bowling Alone, Putnams argument deserves to be seriously considered by everyone interested in our social well-being. Each of us should read Bowling Alone aloneand then discuss it together.

William Kristol, Editor and Publisher, The Weekly Standard

Concerns about the cost of progress for traditional community spirit and neighborliness are examined in a very readable manner by Robert Putnams book Bowling Alone.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern

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To Ruth Swank Putnam and to the memory of Frank L. Putnam, Louis Werner, and Zelda Wolock Werner, exemplars of the long civic generation

In 1995 I published an article in a well-respected but somewhat obscure academic journal, summarizing a lecture I had given in Sweden on the topic of civic engagement in America. Throughout the previous year, I had been following a hunch, poking around in various data sets attempting to piece together a picture of how Americans participation in membership organizations and civic groups had changed over the preceding decades. My preliminary findings seemed to show a steep decline in participation. Based upon previous work I had done in Italywhich argued that healthy democracies depend upon social connectednessI began to wonder if some of the challenges America was facing as we approached the end of the twentieth century might have their roots in a shrinking stock of social capital.