Customer Reviews

The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues Of Community In America

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This is an excellent book that challenges many of the commonly held assumptions about progress. It's almost an elegy to the 1950s, before the Baby Boomers imploded authority, institutions and religious belief. Now these same Boomers curiosly wonder why the streets aren't safe and our popular culture revolves around money and sex. Boomers wanted more individual autonomy and, in the process, they had to destroy the institutions that held communities together--churches, schools, families. Ehrenhalt illustrates his thesis by concentrating on several neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1950s. The history and the real-world stories of the people involved make it very interesting reading. He does a great job (worthy of a novelist) of evoking the character of the time with lots of interesting detail. What's controversial about the book is his belief (contrary to today's requisite belief in empowerment)that most people want rules, regulations, guides, authority. They want a Catholic Church to tell them right from wrong. They want a community that enforces its values. "The Lost City" is an excellent history that will make anyone think about the condition of America in 1990s.

Alan Ehrenhalt's premise is a provocative one: People in the 1950s were happy, and they were happy because they accepted authority. The book is a rebuttal to all those who portray the 1950s as the 'dark ages' of US history, and the author argues that even blacks were better off than popularly believed. Ehrenhalt takes us to three Chicago neighborhoods: the Southwest Side with its working-class Catholic population, the suburban community of Elmhurst, and the black ghetto of Bronzeville. In each, he shows that people in the 1950s were content with their lives, and in many ways were better off than they are now. Even Chicago's black ghetto had a multitude of black-owned businesses and black social organizations, which have since vanished, replaced by nothing but vacant lots and failed housing projects. This is a provocative work of social history that challenges our image of the 1950s, and in addition, it challenges our assumptions about the benefits of free choice and the 'evil' of obedience to authority.

This is a wonderful book which stayed with me for days after reading it. The author essentially boils down the cultural differences between pre and post 1960s America to the rise of personal freedom along with its inherent companion, the demise of societal authority. He does so with a mixture of anecdote and fact, ignoring the mainstream stereotypical view of that era, making for an easy and engaging read.

Whether you view that time through the prism of the establishment, the dispossessed, or the child of either, you will find plenty here to mull as we approach the next phase of our evolving American culture. A fun, interesting read.

It is not often one encounters a scholarly work that is difficult to put down, but The Lost City is just that. I found this book to be immensely readable. Ehrenhalt's writing style is fluid and intriguing. By zeroing in on the individuals and communities that were archetypes of social conditions in the 1950s, the author is able to ground his argument solidly, while weaving an interesting dialogue of people and community.
If you have ever wondered about the "Fabulous Fifties" and what its communities were like, this is the book for you. Those longing for the security and morals of that decade may well be surprised by what was necessary of its citizens. The Lost City is a great read, and belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in society, community, and change.

It is a common cliche that Americans were more orderly, more community-minded, and less individualistic in the 1950s. Ehrenhalt shows how this was so by skillfully examining three Chicago communities: one white working-class urban neighborhood dominated by the Catholic church, a poor African-American neighborhood dominated by a few business leaders and the black church, and a middle-class white suburb dominated by PTAs and similar neighborhood-based community groups. His portrait of those neighborhoods, like a good novel, is readable and feels right.

Ehrenhalt suggests that in all three neighborhoods, people had fewer choices than today, but were perhaps happier and were certainly more community-minded. People did business with local businesses, and had more social ties with people who lived nearby.

According to Ehrenhalt, informal social authority was stronger than today: Americans were more likely to follow their neighbors or local institutions such as public schools, and less likely to follow their own instincts or the regulations of a centralized state. Certainly this is true in some respects: for example, the Catholic Church was far stronger than today.

On the negative side, these institutions were often arbitrary. For example, the sadistic parochial school nun or public school principal is a common figure in pop culture. Why was this so? And why did Americans revolt against it? Ehrenhalt, like a reporter, picks and chooses the stories that fit his mold- so as a result he gives no persuasive answers.

But he does give us some interesting speculation. For example, he suggests that low-level authority figures really were overly strict and arbitrary, causing some of the Baby Boom's rebellion. Ehrenhalt blames such petty tyranny on (a) the possibility that many teachers and priests were scarred by WW 2 and the Great Depression, and (b) the possibility that they were simply overwhelmed by the size of Baby Boom schools and classrooms, and needed to be harsh to maintain order.

Ehrenhalt also points out that even in suburbs, people had much less privacy than they do today. Not only were suburban houses small, but their floor plans tended to maximize public space at the expense of privacy- perhaps explaining Baby Boomers' mania for privacy and "personal space."

This book's descriptions of America today are less sure-footed than its discussion of the past. For example, Ehrenhalt writes that in the 1950s, "most of us in America, grown-ups as well as children, believed in the existence of 'mean guys.' Today, that concept nearly always disappears in the first few years of school, replaced with a vague discomfort with the broader evils of the modern civilized world." Oh, please! Today's America is obsessed with "mean guys"; Americans seclude their children indoors to keep them away from "mean guy" pedophiles, and we redefine our civil liberties to stop "mean guy" Islamists. Ehrenhalt's view of America may fit the NPR-listening Loony Left, but not the terrified majority.

A provocative look at the 1950s--a time when the streets were safe, the schools were good, the kids were well-behaved, and pepple were moral. Ehrenhalt digs into three Chicago neighborhoods and lets them show us why the good old days were good--and bad. This is on my short list of best books ever.list

If you've read The Baffler Magazine and its collection "Commodify Your Dissent" or "Habits of the Heart" that describes todays culture, this book presents a picture that contrasts: the 1950's in Chicago...not so pretty, but not so aweful as the movie Pleasantville common depiction would lead us to believe, either.

For a book I started out relishing in, by the end I was most thoroughly disallusioned and thought Ehrenhalt had, perversely, disproved most of his own conclusions. And he leaves out so much. His sense of 1957 seems to come from advertising, which is an always distorted picture of real life. He never mentions the emergence of Elvis Presley or Hugh Heffner as the earthquakes to our culture and mores that they were. Life seems a lot like it was in "Babbitt", and at the end, the author does compare 1957 to the 20s. But an early statement is devastatingly accurate: "The difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them."

Misty water colored memories for an America that never existed by an entirely forgettable writer.