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larryerick 's review for:
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
I like to think of this as a Malcolm Gladwell book, such as The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, or Outliers: The Story of Success, but written by a well-seasoned embedded war correspondent unusually sensitive to his subject. For anyone who has read the author's popular Afghanistan war book, War, or seen the Restrepo documentary film, you can see a link to modern American soldiers returning home in the text. In fact, I had assumed this was going to be roughly equivalent to David Finkel's Thank You for Your Service companion piece to his Iraq war tome, The Good Soldiers: soldiers in intense war return home without much success, both rather emotionally charged books. This author takes a much different approach. It is not hard to see the book as separate lectures on communities, soldiers and communities in war, and soldiers returning home, but with the central emphasis on our local communities, not on people with weapons. Yes, lectures, but lucid stimulating analysis that have audience members impatient for the Q&A session, not dry readings required by a college curriculum. Each "lecture" gives the reader plenty to chew on. Our American "tribe" is found wanting in several respects, but this is not a highly-charged propaganda piece. It calmly lays out facts on competing social norms and lets the reader see sometimes startling differences, differences we Americans commonly have ignored and continue to ignore to our peril. This book is very much worth the read. The fact that it's a slender volume makes not reading it almost a crime.