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America at Century’s End (Magill Book Reviews)

Alan Wolfe, the editor of this impressive collection, is the Dean of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research and recipient of the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award for WHOSE KEEPER? SOCIAL SCIENCE AND MORAL OBLIGATION (1989). Struck by the generational changes in all aspects of American life, Wolfe has gathered together a series of essays that reflect these changes in a wide variety of social experience: the family, the economy, the media, education, culture, race relations, and, of course, politics.

In the opening section Judith Stacey and Kathleen Gerson explore the conflicts of commitment in postmodern family life in connection with issues turning on gender, kinship, and class. Gary Alan Fine and Jay Mechling discuss the changing nature of childhood, and Claude S. Fischer notes that despite an increasingly cosmopolitan world “place” and neighborhood are still important concepts in family life.

Economics and politics dominate the second unit of essays. Fred Block writes about the United States and its trade rivals, and Katherine S. Newman ponders the cultural anxiety promoted by a weakening domestic economy. Ruth Milkman, Daniel Halle, and Frank Romo examine the problems of labor and management, the changing social contract, and insensitivity on all sides to social and technological change. Problems of race and immigration are explored by Bart Landry and Ruben G. Rumbaut. Sharon Zukin rounds things off with a grim portrait of the loss of economic and political power in our great cities.

In the third group of essays the grip of the media is described by Michael Schudson, the schools under pressure by Caroline Hodges Persell, the weakening of the medical doctor’s authority by Jonathan B. Imber, the changing character of organized religion by James D. Hunter and John S. Rice, and the mingling of popular and high culture by Gaye Tuchman.

Perhaps the strongest essay in the entire volume, J. William Gibson’s reflections on the traumatic aftermath of Vietnam, dominates the fourth section, in which we also hear from Rebecca Klatch on American conservative views of the world and from Jack Katz on the nation’s difficulties in reconciling progressive ideals with criminal justice.

Part 5, “Emerging America,” closes the collection with an interesting study of changing concepts of time in “postindustrial” America by Carmen Sirianni and Andrea Walsh and an essay on the political response to social segmentation by Richard Madsen. Professor Wolfe tries to sum things up by urging theoretical modesty in his fellow sociologists in the face of such complex and universal change. The important thing is to “understand” what is swirling around us before we pronounce things “explained and categorized.”