During the boom years, books about striking it rich in real estate, as well as designing and decorating our abodes, were stacked up in bookstores like bricks. Now that the party is long over, more sober assessments on our national obsession with shelter are hitting the shelves."Craving Community: The New American Dream" by Todd W. Mansfield, Ross P. Yockey and L. Beth Yockey (Abecedary Press, 2007). Suburbia has been satirized as sterile almost as long as it has existed, but now it has a new label: Community Deprivation Syndrome. Drawing from sociological studies and adding anecdotes from themselves and others, the authors replow well-worn ground: that people were not meant to live in isolation -- and that car-driven suburban land planning, along with the Internet, keep us in isolated cocoons, watching videos in our home theaters rather than going to the movies and having wine in our cellars rather than bars, locked away from our neighbors, rather than fostering healthy relationships in more nurturing village settings.
