52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
39. The careless society: community and its counterfeits.
Recommended, as so many in my queue, by the Englewood Review of Books, via twitter. A polemic against institutional service agencies in favor of a community of citizen activists. Threatened at every moment to devolve into libertarian utopianism, believing far better of humanity than it deserves, in the service of some idol of “free choice.” But ultimately, the book stayed just this side of the line, and its common-sense premise — that a system can never produce care (and often produces the opposite), but only human actors in relationship and community — is achingly true. And its vision of “recommunalizing” the labeled and incarcerated into a community of care, rather than rehabilitating, strikes a chord with me. Not a world-changer, but its a quick read and worth a moment of your time, perhaps.
