lan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City

Baby Boomers, Ehrenhalt correctly if just a touch simplistically writes, demanded more personal autonomy and a greater sense of individuality, and in the process of acquiring these traits they ruined the institutions that were holding American communities together: churches, schools, even families.

Ehrenhalt demonstrates his thesis by concentrating on several neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1950s, evoking the component part of the time and place as well as that of his non-fictional "characters" with the accomplishment of a novelist. But all of this beautiful writing can non treat the controversial and for many unpalatable nature of his thesis, which is that people insufficiency rules, regulations, and authority figures, that we all desperately want someone kayoed in that location telling us what is right and what is wrong and what volition happen to us if we stray from a path of virtuous virtue that someone else has defined for us. He summarizes this pourboire, which he sees a form of bargain rather than the traditional Liberal affectionate Contract:

We take a shit grown fond of saying that there is no free lunch, but we forget that it applies in goodish as well as economic terms. Stable relationships, accomplished classroom

Readers who argon members in good standing of the progressive left will respond to this by saying, "Yes, and around time, but look how much further we have to go" and find his arguments unconvincing and even repulsive. It is hard non to think that he is preaching to the choir, and that those he cannot reach - same those left out of the American Dream of the 1950s - are simply too unimportant in his view to worry about.

s, safe streets - the ingredients of what we call community - all come at a price. The price is limits on the choices we can make as individuals, rules and authorities who can enforce them, and a willingness to accept the concomitant that there are bad people in the military man and that sin exists in even the best of us. The price is not low, but the life it makes possible is no small motion (Ehrenhalt, 1995, p. 3).

One of the major limitations of Ehrenhalt's book - even if one agrees with his elementary premises about who should be attended to in creating a community - is that the world that he is writing about no longer exists. In Chapter 11, for example, his chapter on raising children and especially adolescents, he discusses the suburban family as an anti-authoritarian structure that was seen as a brazen new social experiment. It can never be so for us simply because it is not new. We cannot have the untarnished religious belief in a neat front lawn that our parents or grandparents did because we right off know about rates of domestic violence in the suburbs, and valium and drinking and anorexia in teenage girls who looked at their mothers lives and decided that they would do anything to avoid following that same path.

He summarizes this point about one-third of the way through the book:

Ehrenhalt's about convincing arguments in favor of the 1950s as a good place and one that we ourselves might want to copy do not come when he is talking about one particular subject, but rather stem from the unseamed quality of his writing and his ability to make his arguments sound
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