Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place * 1/2

Let me admit up front that I skimmed this book rather than reading it in its entirety. This approach is unusual for me, but whenever I dove into a new section I quickly found myself bored or annoyed.

This non-fiction book extols the multifarious virtues of "third places," which are public places where people gather informally outside of work or home. The author is a sociologist writing in "plain English," although I would characterize the prose style as "academic abstraction drained of academic rigor or detail." To choose an example at random, here's the beginning of Chapter 3:

Precious and unique benefits accrue to those who regularly attend third places and who value those forms of social intercourse found there. The leveling, primacy of conversation, certainty of meeting friends, looseness of structure, and eternal reign of the imp of fun all combine to set the stage for experiences unlikely to be found elsewhere. These benefits also derive from the sociable and conversational skills cultivated and exercised within the third place.

Ray Oldenburg is well-named given that the book pines for the good old days when small-town Americans gathered on Main Street for practical joking and Protestants and Catholics lived in harmony (p 106 -7). For evidence that the book is a screed against modern suburban living, consider the amount of time it spends discussing topics unrelated to third places: cohabitation ("a far from ideal arrangement in a society that continues to value marriage despite its problems"), avarice ("salaries running to six and even seven figures are paid to Neanderthals named Bubba"), over-scheduled kids who can't play poker, and so on.

I started skimming the early chapters because Oldenburg didn't seem to have anything new to say about the hackneyed vision of suburban, TV-watching mall rats. Later, I grew annoyed at the oversimplified nostalgia. The turning point may have been when Oldenburg admits that he'll simply ignore any contravening data:

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, I would insist that any third place is pretty much as I've described it, or it is not a third place. The description presented in the initial chapters is not derived from speculation. It is built from observations, my own and those of others. Thus, it is not sanitized from life but based on careful observation of it.

Translation: Possible counterexamples are excluded by fiat. I know a third place when I see one.