Customer Reviews

One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This review is in response to the negative reviews for this book.

A book should be judged on how well it achieves its goal, not on how well it can razzle-dazzle its readers with culture war rhetoric, complaints, and simplistic solutions. There are plenty of much more popular books for that. Consider, for example, Bernard Goldberg's 2003 book `Bias: A CBS insider exposes how the media distorts the news', currently with 863 customer reviews, or John Perkin's 2004 book, 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman' currently with 783 reviews.

The question that drew me to Alan Wolfe's book is how to account for what might be called `the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon.' How can so many authors and talking heads on radio and cable TV, draw so much attention to the same old issues year after year to address what we call `the culture wars'?

This book is a sociologist's attempt to get to the heart of the matter by probing the thoughts of average Americans. I think he does a great job of illuminating certain `hot spots' (such as gay marriage and `the mommy wars') and exposing most of the culture wars issues as lukewarm at best. Americans are in general agreement on issues concerning affirmative action, immigration, religion, patriotism, welfare, multicultural education and so on.

There is one line in this book that I believe nails the problem:

"There is little question, in other words, that America is furiously divided over the family. These divisions over the family do not take place between camps of people; instead, they take place within most individuals." (p110) - Alan Wolfe

It's a very subtle distinction in a society that values democracy above all. But I think it's a very important one. Are the culture wars an external battle between Left and Right; that is, a political struggle? Or is it the battle that occurs within the soul of each individual? Alan Wolfe contends, if I read him correctly, that by and large, it is an inner struggle that is often projected outward as politics, and that we are not so much divide between Left and Right, but are, in some important ways, irreconcilably divided within - and that this is a healthy consequence of a conscientious people grappling with our self-imposed challenges.

This is an illuminating book, not at all a difficult read, for those willing to grapple with the heart of the matter, rather than fall prey to the cathartic culture war literature from both Left and Right; rhetoric that does nothing more than exacerbate the symptoms they seek to cure.

One Nation After All is an excellent analysis for a fascinationg social research project focusing on the American Middle Class.

The study and subsequent analysis is a well thought out, detailed work packed with citations and comparisons.

As an added plus, the study shows that overall, the American Middle Class is basically a tolerant, reasonable group of people who prefer NOT to tell others how to live their lives.

For the uninitiated, research papers are writtin in the passive voice! This may require some adjustment on the part of the reader.

Though I have not read this book, the last review begs for a response... if you are interested in accounts that go beyond the red and blue divisions and explore similarities, I recommend "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris Fiorina, a Stanford political scientist.

"Culture War?" is a marvelous little book, arguing that the great majority of Americans (i.e. all American citizens minus political elites and extremists) really agree on most of the issues we are often led to consider divisive and insurmountable. I don't personally swallow Fiorina's argument whole, but it certainly contains a lot of truth and valid arguments. In either case, it is a refreshing and thorough alternative view - concise and wonderfully smooth to read, too.

As I have not read the Wolfe Book, I'll go with the average in terms of stars, don't take the rating seriously.

This reminds me of a college term paper, gone horribly wrong. When instructed to write a 10,000 word essay, the student realized he was 5,000 words short. SO, the other 5,000 words are nothing but filler, RUN ON SENTENCES, filler, endless references to the project, and oh did I mention PASSIVE SENTENCES! Jesus H. Christ! Shame on the author, and SHAME ON Putnam-Penguin. Have these people not heard of Grammer Check? The author should have interviewed thousands of people, THEN picked interviews that accurately identified whatever vague societal notion he catagorized. Instead this 'book' is a compilation of whatever 200 citizens just happened to spew forth - Garbage. The author actually thought it important to quote some clown from San Diego who liked the part of his job when he could tell home-owners why he was "going to build a highway right through their community." And in the end, which came at around 231 pages for me, most everyones' opinions, and the authors thesis, were irrelivant. Having a Masters of Science in Counseling and Mental Health, I've avoided writing such drivel, and could only read 2-3 pages at a time, until I could finally go no further. No stars for this book.

The author appears not to have intended for anyone to actually READ this book. Its sentences are horrendously overlong; those few meanings which aren't badly obscured by the turgid writing are overly subtle, and in many cases underwhelming. Don't bother trying to read this.

The previous customer review said the book reminds him of a college term paper gone wrong. Well, I'm currently working on a college term paper on this book, and I'm looking for lots of background info or else this paper WILL go wrong!