Tribe On Homecoming and Belonging

A great read, but at 136 pages I'm not sure why it was published. Felt incomplete or that it should have been a big magazine feature or something. Still a fascinating topic, though.

I wish Sebastian Junger had organized his argument in this book a little better, with references to peer-reviewed articles or other highly credible studies, because I think he's got a point, but it's not a well articulated point. In short, he feels that people, but particularly men, and more particularly combat veteran men, are not integrated into American society in a way that gives their lives meaning after the intense experience of combat, or at least membership in highly cohesive military units with clear missions. I know plenty of such men, starting with myself, who struggled a little or a lot with leaving the military and adapting to the corporate world. Junger contrasts that with the way tribal societies easily re-integrated their men after wars. In my case, the struggle was short-lived; I had children within eighteen months of leaving the Army, and I did not have time for self-pity about how unimportant my engineering job seemed compared to my Army assignments. I moved on, but I never really took my jobs in tech companies all that seriously; we were not saving lives or preventing despots from invading their neighbors. Only in retrospect do I see how much the tech revolution of the '90's and 00's changed the world, and it had a much bigger effect than US military special operations in that era. But if the answer, as Junger seems to imply, is that we need war in order to bind societies together, I disagree. National service, maybe including military service is a good idea, and reducing wealth inequality is an excellent idea, but war is what we do not need. So at the end of the book, I'm really not entirely sure what Junger is advocating, but I do think he is right to call out the growing lack of a sense of community, and the growing us-versus-them partisanship in the US, and to name the ways American individual success undermines the success of the society writ large. There were a lot of interesting anecdotal arguments about why "American Indian" societies were so cohesive, but little in the way of how to bring such cohesiveness to American society.

This book helps shed light on why we are all so lonely in a world that is more connected than ever. An easy read that has me re-evaluating my priorities when I envision my family’s future.

Fascinating book written by a psychologist and dealing with the topic setup by its title - being a part of a tribe instead of individualistic in one’s outlook on life. He comes to some very important conclusions on what is wrong with our American individualistic society. Sadly, he doesn’t come to many answers. While I greatly appreciated and agreed with the observations that he made about our society, I wish that he would have spent at least a portion of time on solutions.

Interesting look at humanity, heavy on military talk though I really enjoyed the book as a whole, but I could've done without so much military research. The military section seemed to repeat itself for fifty pages. The parts about Native American tribes, though, were fascinating. Worth a read if you're interested in community.

I read this book because it was one of Jason Kander’s recommendations during a Twitter chat. I guess it was an okay book though and while I can’t exactly pinpoint what my issue was, I did feel uncomfortable at many points. Maybe it was just too concerned with masculine/male tribal behaviors and didn’t feel universal enough for me to connect.