Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, by Seth D. Kaplan, Little Brown Spark, 272 pages, $30
As America has grown wealthier, it has paradoxically suffered from higher levels of social decay: broken homes, loneliness, drug overdoses, decreased life expectancy. Many writers have offered solutions to such problems, but most of their proposals view the hollowed-out neighborhoods of Detroit or Appalachia either as empty vessels to be filled or as backward vestiges that need to be reorganized and rescued.
