52 Books, Week 22: Urban Tribes

This book is probably the perfect argument why some things shoud be left as a 5 page article. The text is an ethnography of the time a young urban professional spends between college and marriage. Sprinkled throughout the text are some wild jabs at a unifying theory, but it never really gets out of the gate in a coherent fashion (in all fairness to the author, at the end of the book he does admit that the whole thing could be bullshit).

Watts argues that small collectives of friends in big cities (between 5 and 40) are serving similar functions that young marriages did a generation ago (providing support networks, people to eat with, etc). Some of the points hit pretty close to home for me (especially since i'm terrified of the possibility of marriage), and it can almost be viewed as a rebuttal to the Bowling Alone argument that society is crumbling because people aren't participating in communal activities the way they used to in the good ole days (the rip roaring 6o's I guess, when every one was in the rotary club, or big bowling leagues).

I wish the book articulated its point better, but it didn't. Probably in the bottom 10% of books I read this year. I got this book in the greatest bookstore in the world (Powell's in Portland), and if I had done my due dilligence on Amazon.com, I would have probably passed. From this day on, I solemnly swear, not to purchase a book that has less than three stars. Lesson Learned...