Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility.
It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing opportunity gap emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was.
Robert Putnam about whom The Economist said, "His scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny," offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students "our kids" went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book.
Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.
Reviews with the most likes.
I have great respect for Dr. Putnam. He has obviously done a huge amount of work and thinking in this book and the stories are quite vivid. Yet I can't but help thinking that he hasn't peeled back yet another layer of the onion in getting to the root causes of what he sees. Personally, I think that most of the social problems are the result of the revolution of the 60's and the increase in secularization of America. Still, a very worthwhile read.
Once again, I read this for uni and anything I read by force is something I will automatically have a resistance to lmao. That said, this has some very interesting points and Putnam illustrates and exemplifies them well by using interviews from people living in the situations he writes about. I learned a lot about the opportunity gap for kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds even if I found some sections to be a little heavy on the stats. Would recommend if this is a subject you're interested in, otherwise it might be a bit dry.
