*Starred Review* How did zip codes become as useful to political activists as to mail carriers? In the relatively new cultural dynamics of political segregation, Bishop discerns a troubling transformation of American life. Complex and surprising, the story of that transformation will confound readers who suppose that recent decades have made American society both more diverse and more tolerant. Pinpointing 1965 as the year when events in Vietnam, Washington, and Watts delivered body blows to traditional social institutions, Bishop recounts how Americans who had severed ties to community, faith, and family forged new affiliations based on lifestyle preferences. The resulting social realignment has segmented the nation into groupthink communities, fostering political smugness and polarization. The much-noted cartography of Red and Blue states, as Bishop shows, actually distorts the reality of a deeply Blue archipelago of urban islands surrounded by a starkly Red rural sea. Bishop worries about the future of democratic discourse as more and more Americans live, work, and worship surrounded by people who echo their own views. A raft of social-science research underscores the growing difficulty of bipartisan compromise in a balkanized country where politicians win office by satisfying their most radical constituents. A book posing hard questions for readers across the political spectrum.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2008 Booklist

Bill Bishop and Robert G. Gushing see danger in America's increasingly homogeneous communities. AS catchy pop-social science coinages go, "the Big Sort" may not have quite the pith or resonance of, say, "bobos" or "tipping points." But in attempting to define and argue the implications of the sweeping social and political balkanization that has swept across America over the last 30 years, Bill Bishop has set his sights ambitiously on David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell territory: identifying a big, worldview-changing social science phenomenon, and interpreting it for a popular audience. Superficially, the phenomenon Bishop is examining is not new, and the litany of division he recites is familiar. The two major political parties have become more extreme and can't find common ground anymore. National civic groups and mainline church denominations have withered away, replaced by smaller, more narrowly focused independent groups. Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly "micro-targeted" segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We're bowling alone - or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way. This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don't. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they've clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where "The Big Sort," which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original. Working with a team of collaborators (including Richard Florida, the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class"), Bishop and Cushing swam around in different sets of data - voting records; I.R.S. income figures; patent filings; poll numbers from advertising firms - to figure out how thoroughly, and in what ways, Americans had sorted themselves. Their conclusion: "By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable." Americans have always moved around restlessly. But whereas in earlier times large flows of people - the "great migration" of African-Americans to Chicago in the 1950s, for instance, or the "hillbilly highway" that took white Appalachians to the Midwest after World War II - were motivated primarily by the quest for economic opportunity, American migration is now inspired at least as much by "lifestyle" choices as by economics. "We have built a country," Bishop writes, "where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of 'those people' who live just a few miles away." Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disoriented - and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves. This sorting was compounded in the 1980s and '90s as the clustering of educated people in certain cities produced regional wage disparities - which in turn attracted more-highly educated people to the richer cities, which in turn accentuated the economic disparities between cities, creating a cycle of division that shows little sign of relenting. THIS intense geographic sorting helps account for an abiding weirdness in American politics. Congress is split right down the middle, or nearly so; the last two presidential elections have been achingly close; half the nation, almost by definition, must disagree with you politically - and yet you have probably met very few of your antagonists. "How can the polls be neck and neck," the playwright Arthur Miller lamented during the 2004 election, "when I don't know one Bush supporter?" Gerrymandering - the redrawing of political districts by partisan legislation from above - partly accounts for increasing polarization. But the more significant force, Bishop argues, has been movement from below. In 1976, the year in the postwar era when the average American was most likely to live alongside people of the opposing political party, barely 26 percent of us lived in counties that went in a landslide for one presidential candidate or another. In 1992, nearly 38 percent of us lived in a "landslide county." By 2004, nearly 50 percent did. Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does. Psychological studies suggest that the mere fact of division, even when there is no substantive content to it, can be corrosive: in a series of experiments in the 1950s and '60s, groups of similar people arbitrarily divided into subgroups quickly exploded into conflicts of "Lord of the Flies"-like intensity. Other studies have shown that when relatively like-minded people are grouped together, they don't settle around the average point of view of the individuals in the group but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they're already inclined. This gives clustering a powerful self-reinforcing quality, and helps explain how American counties have hardened into such immovable political clumps. "It doesn't seem to matter if you're a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal or a federal appeals court judge," Bishop writes. "Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes." The founding fathers didn't need social psychology experiments to understand that homogeneity could be dangerous. In their wisdom, they created a system of government that called for constant conversation and compromise among competing interests - what Alexander Hamilton called the "jarring of parties." This system has proved durable and effective, but it breaks down when people of different parties or points of view no longer intermingle at all. Are we doomed to retreat ever farther into our enclaves? A few pages from the end of the book, Bishop writes (in a notably wooden but unfortunately typical sentence) that "it's wishful thinking to predict that a Generation Y L.B.J. will emerge to become ... some kind of Webbased 'deus ex MySpace' politician who could forge a national consensus out of our disparate communities." But then, as if hedging his bets, Bishop has included a footnote: "Barack Obama presented himself early in the 2008 campaign as the man-of-the-earth candidate, the politician able and eager to speak to - and listen to - all sides." Even so, Bishop's view seems to be that no single candidate or election cycle can reverse these powerful trends; that only the rise of a "cross-cutting" issue - something that realigns political alliances across existing boundaries - can restore a sense of common purpose. Actually, there may be another way. Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let's hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need. Scott Stossel, the author of "Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver," is deputy editor of The Atlantic.

Pulitzer Prize-finalist Bishop offers a one-idea grab bag with a thesis more provocative than its elaboration. Bishop contends that "as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics." There are endless variations of this clustering-what Bishop dubs the Big Sort-as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities-even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: "balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life." Bishop's argument is meticulously researched-surveys and polls proliferate-and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our "post materialistic" society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that "like does attract like" becomes an exercise in redundancy. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Americans seek others like themselves and form attachments to them. This occurs in residential choice and membership in voluntary groups such as churches. What Americans seemingly want are neighbors who think as they do on political and cultural matters, resulting in sharp divisions among citizens, which presumably mirror the polarization of legislative bodies. A cultural shift characterized by a "post-materialist" mentality occurred in the watershed year of 1965. Many people were affected more by cultural issues and less by economic concerns; they increasingly disaffiliated from the two political parties; and they expressed less confidence in leaders of government, churches, and schools. In 1974, citizens began to divide into two camps: those with strong fundamentalist religious beliefs allied themselves with conservative and Republican groups, while those who were less religious found liberal and Democratic groups more to their liking. All of this has resulted in the formation of small communities of people who share nearly identical political, cultural, and religious views. These are the claims of journalist Bishop, expressed in a somewhat disorganized way and abetted by a number of stories and a smattering of research results, none of it very convincing. Summing Up: Optional. General collections/public libraries. D. Harper University of Rochester

Birds of a feather flock together, and that's not always a good thing, according to journalist and blogger Bishop in this timely, highly readable discussion of American neighborhoods and the implications of who lives in them. Writing with sociologist and statistician Cushing, Bishop looks at the "geodemographic segmentation" of America: like-minded people clumping together by age, income, education, religion, ethnicity, occupation, housing types, and family status in communities across the nation (e.g., Lubbock, TX, as opposed to Cambridge, MA), listening to and discussing only the news that suits them. This circumstance, Bishop says, accounts for the "landslide" effect (think Blue and Red states), by which candidates from either party win by enormous margins within counties owing to the "us vs. them" mentality that has taken over American politics in the last 30 years. This social polarization is, of course, only too evident in both houses of Congress; it is hard to imagine, from today's vantage point, that in 1965 half the Republicans in the Senate voted for President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare bill. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.