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Simon & Schuster
March 2015
On Sale: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 1476769893
EAN: 9781476769899
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap
from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer
Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility. It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard,
buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the
America we believe in—a nation of opportunity, constrained
only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five
years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge.
Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity,
the idea that all kids, regardless of their family
background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot
in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems
no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was. Robert Putnam—about whom The Economist said, “his
scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his
tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently
funny”—offers a personal but also authoritative look at this
new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school
class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast
majority of those students—“our kids”—went on to lives
better than those of their parents. But their children and
grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing
prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity
through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from
cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a
formidable body of research done especially for this book. Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and
rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of
the American dream that should initiate a deep examination
of the future of our country.
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