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Rating: 
Summary: All you need to know about community empowerment
Review: EVERYONE should read this book. It is very well thought out and very convincing. Change is possible by sticking together and empowering ourselves as self-reliant communities. The appendix takes up no less than a third of the whole book and is a gold mine in and of itself.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting but not practical
Review: He presents well the case for locally-owned business being better for a community's economic well-being than are chain and franchise stores, and provides lots of different examples of ways that businesses can be community oriented. I found particularly interesting the part about the Green Bay Packers, who were saved out of bankruptcy by a group of fans who sold "stock" to the community to raise the cash. You can't sell the stock to a non-GB resident, you can't own more than 1 (I think) share, and you can only sell shares at the same price you bought them for: $25. Really, sounds a lot like the ICC's shares, and it guarantees that the Pack will never leave Green Bay.On presenting options for ownership, though, Shuman seems to go a little overboard. When trying to decide how to promote the kinds of business he wants, Shuman starts reasonably enough, but quickly moves into the implausible. Suggestions such as using zoning law to encourage local business (by discouraging development in the locations and of the scale that WalMart likes to build) and implementing local currencies to encourage patronage of locally-oriented business are useful, and have been successfully used in many places. However, when we get into suggestions about tearing down the WTO and replacing it with something that supports local business, we're getting unreasonable. While it may be possible that the WTO would become less multinational- and more local-friendly, I'm betting that it will only do so when its member states do so, and not as a first step which will encourage its members to do so. Shuman seems to realize this to some extent, as he proposes pro-local legislation in the United States Congress, but this too is unuseful. Fun to read, but not practical at all.
Rating:
Summary: A Highly Important Book for Any Concerned Citizen
Review: This book cuts through all of the conventional public discussions on the economy and society to make a clear, convincing case for reviving local communities. Pundits, politicians, and intellectuals are always bemoaning the collapse of "community," but their analyses are usually coiled around morality, or the need for "better education," or some equally superficial issue. But as Shuman points out, all the civic involvement and moral uprightness in the world is useless if our towns and cities are being held hostage by globe-trotting corporations and ultra-mobile capital. "Community" is only possible if people control their own lives; and this is possible only when there are thriving, viable local economies. This is not a book that calls for a complete retreat from the global forces that are shaping our world -- that option is impossible with the current levels of technology. But what Shuman does outline is a way for communities to reestablish a balance between the local and the national/global, in the areas of production, finance, and government. And unlike many other books, which never get past the critique to make any positive prescriptions, this one is brimming with concrete proposals. It also has the most extensive list of groups, organizations, and resources that I have seen in the area of decentralized economics and community self-reliance. This is a must-read.
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