The Tribes of America: Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures

Wonderfully balanced dispatches from the start of America’s culture wars. Cowan is an worthy writer that takes some from the new journalist school with little of their self-indulgences, focusing on the subject and issue at hand. He reported on most of the significant battle fields of the seventies as the heroics of civil rights soured into busing and housing scandals and issues of urban crime, the start of a populist evangelic movement (in a violent conflict over school textbooks), immigrants and illegals and the border patrols on the Mexico-America border, and violent union strikes. Much of this is still with us or was for the last couple of decades and Cowan examines it with great sense of balance and willingness to let every side speak its piece. What could be depressing is thoughtful and evocative.