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The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
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About This Book
An eminent political scientist's brilliant analysis of economic, social, and political trends over the past century demonstrating how we have gone from an individualistic "I" society to a more communitarian "We" society and then back again—and how we can learn from that experience to turn the corner towards a stronger, more unified nation, from the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids. Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we've been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, our nation turned another corner, and all of these trends reversed, leaving us in today's disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an "I" society to a "We" society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam's most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.
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Reviews
"A tour de force exploration of why America got better and then went into reverse."
"Putnam and Garrett are rewriting the political history of the twentieth century here ..."
"The amount of information is enormous, and, while it is clearly conveyed, often with accompanying graphs, Putnam and Garrett's study should be considered more of a specialized resource than a narrative read."
"An unabashed centrism prevails: political stability, the authors recognise, is a dance that requires a measure of cooperation and disciplined deportment from both parties ..."
"Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett tackle this question in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, a thoughtful and highly readable account of the way that these competing values have played out ..."
"It demonstrates all of Putnam's fluency with statistics and graphs to illustrate that things were only getting better — though the authors pass by too quickly the 1930s depression, when gross domestic product per capita fell by 20 per cent in four years."
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