A Nation of Strangers

by Vance Packard

Book Overview

"Rootlessness is destroying American society. the soaring divorce rate, racial unrest, the generation gap, chaotic sexual values--all spring from the American habit of "moving on," never settling in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067950351X
• ISBN13: 9780679503514
• Release Date: September 1972
• Publisher: McKay
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Explains that Red vs. Blue election map

In Nation of Strangers, Packard argued that the increasing mobility of the American workforce was destined to have unforeseen and deleterious effects on society. To begin with he stated the fundamental problem : Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time. A great many people are disturbed by the feeling that they are rootless or increasingly anonymous, that they are living in a continually changing environment where there is little sense of community. He then identified several major traffic flows of the nation's populace. He discussed the reasons for these phenomena, mostly employment related, and acknowledged the benefits that such mobility might arguably provide, but then he listed the negative effects of what he called the "Curious Life Styles of Loosely Rooted People" Surprisingly, for it's age, even some of the book's remedies are still germane. Packard called for : greater corporate responsibility to limit compulsory relocation of employees; people to work closer to their homes in order to be able to spend more time with their families and in their neighborhoods; people to acquire fixed second homes, vacation homes that the family would all return to regardless of where individual members were located; improvement of four year community colleges to encourage the young to stay closer to home during their college years; strengthening family ties, most controversial among the methods would be steps to salvage marriage and to reduce the growth of "one layer communities," the types of massive retirement communities whose location you can see on the map in Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere--as he puts it, the self-segregation of older Americans represents a neglect of the responsibility to nurture and share wisdom, "independence at the expense of generational interdependence." The electoral evidence offers us a probable additional remedy that would help, removing the Social Welfare Net that makes such isolation feasible. In these proposals, as in most of the book, Packard demonstrates a really canny understanding of problems that other people of the time had not even yet recognized. It is well worth reading now, but one wishes it had been read and understood better then. Had it been, that map might look a lot different and be a little less frightening. GRADE : A