Word: putnam
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...despite these economical acronyms for the weaponry and technogadgetry with which he is so obsessed, Clancy cannot seem to turn in a novel that weighs less than a laptop. At 4 lbs. and 874 pages, his ninth, Executive Orders (Putnam; $27.95), is another doozy of laborious plot, bombastic jingoism and tedious detail. This time out, Clancy hero Jack Ryan, former CIA director, National Security Adviser, investment banker and maritime historian, gets the only job left to him that doesn't involve manning a cash register at Denny's: President of the United States...
...were delighted to read Richard Stengel's reply [NATION, July 22] to Robert Putnam's 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," in which Putnam asserted that Americans' traditional engagement in civic activities has been in a 25-year decline. We couldn't agree more with Stengel! There is, indeed, a hidden revolution of citizen involvement that's not reflected in the declining membership rolls of traditional civic groups. But the media typically fail to report on the new forms of civic participation that contradict Putnam's notion of waning social capital. A vast universe of American public life, including citizen-based initiatives...
That is why Robert Putnam's 1995 essay "Bowling Alone" touched a national nerve. Putnam, a Harvard professor of government, used the catchy image of more Americans bowling by themselves and fewer in leagues to assert that traditional civic engagement in America has been on a long, slow decline for the past 25 years. Citing diminished participation in organizations like the PTA and the League of Women Voters, Putnam's essay seemed to reinforce a widespread feeling that civic life in America just wasn't what it used it to be. The nation's diminishing social capital was lamented...
...militia groups and the legislation proposed by Indiana Senator Dan Coats to promote volunteerism reflect, in their own ways, a frustration with government and a wariness of its reach. Which is why many scholars have expressed concern that Americans have been turning inward during the past 25 years. Putnam and others argue that such self-help groups as 12-step organizations and New Age religions have usurped and replaced outward-looking civic groups. In his book Trust, Francis Fukuyama says that the "rights revolution" of the 1970s and '80s undermined the country's sense of community. I replaced...
...first glance, the Bowling Alone thesis would seem to fit neatly with the post-'60s outlook of conservatives who believe an overweening central government is like a great tree whose shadow does not allow civic engagement to grow underneath it. But Putnam's thesis, as Nicholas Lemann wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, also has had an appeal for liberals exhausted from their battles to keep federal money flowing into their programs. A revival of civic engagement, Lemann pointed out, doesn't require spending money or raising taxes, yet it satisfied the liberals' yearning for social activism. And it relieved both...