THE DIFFERENT DRUM: Community Making and Peace

More self-help for individuals, organizations, and governments from the religious psychiatrist who wrote the best-selling The Road Less Traveled. Here Peck offers his model of a successful community as the solution for everything from individual neurosis to nuclear war. He begins With his own experience of becoming part of a community, and then looks at communities as a therapist who has worked with everyone from squabbling church vestries to small-town planning boards. His final and most important aim is to apply his techniques and philosophy to world governments and disarmament, in this, Peck reveals himself to be a progressive in the 19th-century style of Edward Bellamy or Henry George, one who refuses to succumb to the feelings of helplessness prevalent among the intellectuals and politicians of his day. For this reason his book is refreshing and quite inspiring, though it will undoubtedly invite guffaws from the ""realists"" who don't buy Peck's argument that a radical change in our world view is the only pragmatic solution in a planet threatened by nuclear destruction. Peck's straightforward narrative style lacks the metaphorical power to lead us to a profound understanding of what he means by ""love"" or ""sharing tears and joy."" One wishes that he would not fall back on sentimental and vague usage at the most climactic parts of his book. But this lapse is due more to his failings as a writer than as a thinker, since his model for community building is remarkably rigorous and hardheaded.