Ehrenhalt, the editor of Governing magazine, compares 1950s American mundane life, as experienced in three greater Chicago neighborhoods, to today's times. Almost inevitably, this is an exercise of a conservative world view yielding conservative-affirming results. Ehrenhalt argues that what was lost in the assertion of Sixties liberation politics was the pervasive, sustaining concept of authority. By avoiding the retrospective idealism of nostalgia, however, Ehrenhalt argues a case that should impress, though not convert, liberal readers. In Chicago, his laboratories are white ethnic St. Nick's on the West Side and the South Side's Bronzeville African American enclave. Ehrenhalt concludes with an unconvincing tribute to high Victorianism that mars the balance of his historical observations, yet in sum this makes a good acquisition for libraries supporting urban, community, and American studies.?Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine and author of The United States of Ambition (1991), explores what was gained and lost when the children of the 1950s rejected the social bargain that defined their parents' lives. He studies three communities: St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish in the Bungalow Belt on Chicago's Southwest Side; Bronzeville, the narrow South Side strip where segregation forced almost all African Americans to live; and Elmhurst, an older suburb west of the city facing the demands of new subdivisions. Different as these communities were, all three were communities: geographically defined, linked by street life and dozens of clubs and organizations, led by widely respected authority figures--including clergymen who cultivated congregants' moral convictions. Ehrenhalt maintains that 1950s adults accepted limited choice, restricted privacy, and sometimes overbearing authority in return for stable communities, jobs, relationships, clear rules, and trusted leaders: a trade-off the majority--though not those excluded from the bargain's payoffs--felt was fair. Their children rebelled against this bargain and are still searching for satisfactory anchors to replace community, authority, and sin. Challenging and provocative. Mary Carroll
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