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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to Read? Yes...but worth it, June 5, 2001
This review is from: One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other (Mass Market Paperback)
I agree with Denise's review that this book offers hope more than anything else. It is rather academic, and does make you want to put it down. Nonetheless, in a world where TV commentators routinely portray Americans as "us and them" based on, say, their presidential vote, it is refreshing to read of alternative views. We are more similar than dissimilar - it just won't make for an electrifying show on "Crossfire" or "Hardball". Professor Wolfe does have some unifying themese throughout the book, which does raise this from 3 to 4 stars in my view. Without them, it's not an easy read. In fact, I'd recommend printing a condensed version of this. Say, a NY Times Sunday Magazine-length story or even a Reader's Digest one. The story it tells is that important.
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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough insight into middle class america, October 22, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other (Mass Market Paperback)
I had to read this book for my introductory Sociology class, and did so purely out of requirement. However, what I found was that I actually liked the book. It was excellently written and the research behind it was sound. It offers a glimpse into the American middle class that is both interesting and important. I look forward to reading more books by Alan Wolfe.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ill-advised incursion into empirical research, July 12, 2009
This review is from: One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other (Mass Market Paperback)
Alan Wolfe has been around forever, or so it seems. He has spent most of his career as a social commentator, adviser to high government officials such as President Bill Clinton, and occasional critic of social theory and the disappointments it sometimes produces. Whatever the quality of his usual work, Wolfe has demonstrated in One Nation After All that it is unwise for bookish policy wonks to jump head first into empirical research. Though he directed a fairly large team of researchers with training in ethnography and survey research, Wolfe's lack of experience with empirical work led to the production of an ambitious, but ill-conceived and poorly executed piece of policy research. Wolfe's serious limitations as a researcher were manifest throughout his book, but were most conspicuously troublesome in the fixed-response survey items he put to his middle class respondents. Exaggerating a good deal less than the reader might imagine, the items were of the sort that ask, "America is not the worst place on the world to live." The respondent then had five response categories, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, with which to offer his response. In the case of every item, much as the hypothetical one in the previous sentence, it was easy to predict how respondents would answer, and it was easy to see that their responses would exhibit a high level of homogeneity. One gets the impression that Wolfe was not trying to find out if middle class America is, in fact, culturally homogeneous. Instead, he seemed determined to demonstrate that cultural homogeneity prevails. It is commonplace for folks who have made it fairly big in a related line of endeavor to think they can jump into empirical research with both feet and produce good quality work. They are almost always wrong. When the researcher has an agenda, embodied in questionnaire items and other aspects of his work, badly deficient research is a virtual certainty. As it is, Wolfe's work lends little or nothing to determining if the American middle class is culturally homogeneous. One Nation After All is the kind of book that gives social research a bad name.
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