For some reason, this visionary book has kept its relevance for over fifty years (revised early Sixties). A work of Goodman's youth, around the time he taught at Black Mountain College, Communitas is by turns common sensical, prophetic, poetic, absurdly idealistic, & frequently (deliberately) hilarious.

What was so terribly dehumanizing about American cities (the model here is New York) in the Forties has not been corrected in any major way. In the aftermath of 9/11, with that horrible, gaping hole where the Towers stood, one turns again to Communitas & reads about banning cars from New York, making the the city's avenues pedestrian & bike friendly, preserving good neighborhoods with indigenous personalities, & transforming other harsh, declining or gentrifying areas into safe, humane areas that are welcoming & which provide homes, schools & shopping areas that erase racial & class divides.

The Goodmans eagerly to take on Frank Lloyd Wright, Bucky Fuller, the international & all the other various schools of designs for living then current. They reach back to earlier American, British & European models of community that showed promise through their partial successes.

This is a deeply felt & humane call for holistic, human-sized communities within our cities. Ultimately, the solutions may not be so grandiose as some of those suggested here. But the World Trade Center Towers, awesome as they were, were coldly & absurdly beyond human scale; symbols of our subservience to a system of economics that is usually blind to basic human requirements; gigantic obstacles to the simple warmth of an afternoon's sunshine. I suspect Paul Goodman despised them.

This book has meant much to me personally. I always suggest that people buy the book for themselves. I am so dissappointed because I did not get my book back from someone who borrowed it. However, for me it is worth it to buy another one.

For anyone who is a student of Gestalt Therapy this book is a must. Stoehr's work gave me a deep appreciation for the intellectual legacy of Paul Goodman.

book is due to be reprinted by Open Court in September 199

Paul Goodman has laid it out: school is another racket where people are taught they need the ministrations of the school system. Written in the sixties when it was still fashionable to speak of alienation, Compulsory Miseducation is a bracing reminder that human beings are born free and possess the capacity to shape their own lives outside the institutionalized context of schooling.

Written in 1964, Paul Goodman's anaylsis of the educational system and bureaucracy has proven all too true. The system has gone farther awry than even Mr. Goodman could have guessed, as we have added the penal system and mandatory sentencing to those discarded as cogs/clones in the educational system. The sad part is, despite the warnings of Goodman and scores of others, our schools aren't getting any better. Academic inflation (quantifiable degrees vs. knowledge) has persisted beyond anyone's dreams. The whole educational/government/corporate troica has all but strangled free thought and innovation. It's a shame that this book is out of print, as it should be required reading for school teachers, legislators, parents. As our educational process becomes increasing irrelevant and more kids get lost in the shuffle to be scopped up by gangs/police, this book becomes all the more meaningful.

I originally bought this book because it was published about five years after Apartheid's official demise and promised to be about "the New South Africa." There aren't many stories that come out of that country these days and it is difficult finding real information about the transition to full democracy. Regretfully, this book adds little to the quest for answers about South Africa's future.

The author does a good job of interviewing various segments of South African society, but nearly 75% of the book focuses on Apartheid, which has been effectively dead since 1990. This book has the same feel as the many dozens of others that were written prior to Mandela's election. Technically the author is conducting the interviews post-Apartheid, but the reliance is on the old ghosts of the past to excuse tacit failure.

Perhaps most frustrating are the slight clues dropped along the way that hint at corruption and crime, two areas most indicative of national direction (especially in Africa), although the author never indulges us with detail. This is unfortunate because a lot of effort was spent to put together a book that gives precious little insight into whether South Africa will wind up as another Zimbabwe, or if the continent's last great hope will manage to retain its economy and pull up its neighbors as many of us were so hopeful of in 1990.

I first heard about this book on a radio talk show and immediately ordered it through Amazon.com. Listening to the author talk about his views on South Africa was quite interesting because he loves the country and its people and is cautiously enthusiastic about its future, but reading his book reveals that the vast problems South Africa faces are incredibly complex and that it may well take several generations to create an egalitarian society. One really wonders if South Africa will stand the test of time and not become another Rwanda or Yugoslavia.

The author intelligently divided the book into four parts: an introduction in which he talks about his early trips in South Africa under apartheid and the current social situation of the country, four portrait sections in which he includes a pair of interviews with people on opposite sides of the current post-apartheid experience, and a sensible personal conclusion. The reader should expect moving as well as harrowing personal accounts of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Many things throughout the book will bring hope to the reader; however, that hope will be checked by Goodman's well-informed statistics on criminality and unemployment in present-day South Africa. The book definitively deserves a wide readership.

Having visited South Africa in October, 1998, and seen the extensive squatters areas described by the author, I do not believe that readers of his book can adequately understand the extreme poverty he describes. It has to be seen and experienced to be appreciated. Mr. Goodman's portraits of the eight people in his book gives flesh and humanity to the otherwise dehumanizing nature of apartheid. I think his work is best appreciated if you have seen South Africa for yourself. For your readers who have not been to South Africa, they owe it to themselves to see it. I believe you can not remain unmoved by what you see and one must come away from that experience a better person.

This document is of no value. Save your time and money and look elsewhere.

This is not a book, it isn't even a meaningful document.
It is an accenture marketing collatoral piece that has no substance. To even pay a couple of bucks for this, I feel robbed.
This should be free brochure-ware on Accentures web site not something sold (...). Shame on Accenture!

This is a brochure that is largely useless. Shame on Accenture for offering it and shame on Amazon.com for calling it an E-Book. I didn't notice the page count was 2 and so I am fooled once. Not again. (Readers: Note that 0 stars is not a choice.)

This is marketing brochure ware for Accenture. 3 pages long like their mapping the channel brochure. This is just wrong to sell even for a couple of dollars. Shame on you!
In the future put this as free advertisement on your web site as it should be.