Lisbeth Schorr has written a first-rate book filled with extensive research on community programs that work. Anyone who is trying to find solutions to problems in their communities will find this resource extremely valuable. I've made it required reading for all my medical students doing a Leadership in Community Medicine elective, and the students have found it not only enormously readable and practical, but many have also purchased their own copies for future reference.

Disjointed collection of policy ideas for strengthening community. Contradicts herself far too often (as where she calls for greater commuinity control over what and how social services are provided, but then later says the Federal Government must control the process since state and local governments can't be trusted to provide specific services).

Another glaring flaw is her tendency to cite marginal writings by fringe academics in support of her proposals. Most of those proposals, by the way, call for a massive new infusion of taxpayer money.

The first two chapters are a very good concise analysis of current social service provision. After that the book peters out in a mish-mash of muddled thinking.

Schorr documents some of the success stories in our attempts to overcome economic and social disadvantage and fight the dissolution of real world communities. But almost all of these are small-scale and depend for their success on unique individuals. The difficulty, she says, is that we don't know how to scale up these micro-social experiences. Almost invariably, successful models are bureaucratised when they are expanded and government funding spread so thin that the intensive effort applied at the micro-scale is incapable of reproduction society-wide.

Schorr's analysis is telling, but her solutions are unconvincing. She is unable to extract general lessons from the few exceptions she has been able to locate.

There is one outstanding lesson here and it is that successful social welfare schemes depend on an intensive effort and a huge injection of funds. What Schorr never tells us is where government will find the huge sums of money necessary to correct for early family breakdown.

The challenge is to discover how we can correct for poor socialisation in these early years when family and community fail. The effort is so intensive and time-consuming the first time around, that it is difficult to think how society could afford to reproduce it later, after the first attempt has failed.