By Laurent A. Parks Daloz, Cheryl H. Keen, James P. Keen, and Sharon Daloz Parks.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 288 pp. $25.00.
Common Fire: Lives of Commitment in a Complex World by Laurent Parks Daloz, Cheryl Keen, James Keen, and Sharon Daloz Parks contains the voices and stories of individuals who have chosen to live their lives in ways that help make a difference in a very complicated world. These people have devoted their lives to effecting change from founding a hazardous waste cleanup company to locating business internships for African American and Latino youth. The authors explore the roots, cultivation, and costs of lives of commitment and offer some conclusions on what it may take to encourage and sustain lives dedicated to the common good.
The title, Common Fire, is derived from the image of the town commons, "a shared, public space that anchored the American vision of democracy" (p. 2). The essential ingredient here (albeit somewhat idealized, as the authors confess) is the common as a meeting place and place for conversation, the place where people share a stake, participate, and accept responsibility for something communal. It is the authors' contention that in an increasingly complicated world, the sense of connection that once existed around the town common is being quickly eroded. Today's new commons is "global in scope, diverse in character and dauntingly complex" (p. 3). Accepting responsibility for communal issues in the new commons requires a new set of skills, the ability to connect everyday work with global concerns, and the recognition that one's own well-being is inextricably intertwined with the good of a diverse whole.
This book is the product of several years of research. The authors, four educators, conducted interviews with over one hundred people, all with widely divergent roles, responsibilities, backgrounds, and personal characteristics. Drawn from poor, working-class, middle-class, and elite families, half are male and half are female. Ranging in age from thirty-two to eighty-plus, some respondents are Democrats, some Republicans, and some Independents. The sample was carefully selected to reflect the diversity in place of birth, race, age, gender, ethnicity, political persuasion, and religion of U.S. society. Though diverse, the common thread is that each of these individuals shares what the authors call "a long-term commitment to the common good" (p. 5). Included in this group are Maria Velasquez (all names are pseudonyms), who is starting a new high school for urban youth; Ben Greystone, who, at the age of sixty-eight, is actively teaching public health; Joanna Chapman, who is connecting members of the local community with prison inmates; and Todd North, who, over nearly a decade, has built a neighborhood economic development project into a million-dollar-plus corporation responsible for providing a wide range of local social services from battered women's shelters to a home winterization program.
The authors did not intend their book to be simply a collection of narratives about the lives of "distinctive" people, however engaging that might be. Although they present the stories and perspectives of the individuals they interviewed, the authors' aim is to draw on these stories to illuminate commonalities among respondents and to explore the patterns found across respondents' lives to "understand how these committed people think about themselves and the world, and what led them to live the way they do" (p. 8). As the authors explain,
our purpose is to . . . reflect the lives of the many people who live and work in committed and sustained ways amidst the complexity of the new commons in behalf of the common good. They are not "special" or "exceptional," although they are perhaps distinctive for they manifest qualities and forms of competence that are more in tune with the realities of the emergent world than with some of the assumptions of the past. . . . Most important, they reflect the potential in all of us to find the strength and quality of commitment needed for the practice of citizenship in the twenty-first century. (pp. 78)
The authors conclude with an exploration of the practical ways connections between people can be fostered in different sectors of our society. This book is an important read for anyone interested in cultivating a commitment to the common good.
j.b.