428 NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW [July

Boob in Review . . . Jewel Bcllwh, Editor

Community Development

MENT: Experiments in Self-Help. By Marshall B. Clinard. The Free Press, A Division of The Macmillan Company, 866 Third Avenue, New York 10022, 1966.

The dedication of academicians to test their hypotheses at times involves physi- cal discomfort and a haunting frustra- tion. Obviously, the author experienced both sensations, and perhaps more, in his three-year field work in India, where he tried to prove the value of self-help in urban community development. While the city is everywhere, we are only on the frontiers of knowledge as to how to prepare the city for man and his en- joyment. In fact, the horror and inten- sity of slum life in many parts of the world-the disease, isolation, conges- tion-makes one wonder if any improve- ment is possible in the coming decades.

Clinard represents that group of scholars who refuse to give up the battle and, through his field work, he reveals a healthy optimism and abiding faith. H e belongs to the contingent of Aliskys, Frank Riessmans, Haggstroms, et al., who believe that through such mechanisms as “vikas mandals”-peo- ples’ councils-the slum can be converted into a laboratory for self-improvement. The author cautiously claims that com- munity development in Delhi proved reasonably successful but admits to serious weaknesses: Not all vikas mandals were effective; some workers did not perform as anticipated; lack of cooperation, if not open hostility, existed among government agencies ; difficulties arose in keeping up the momentum of the citizen self-help spirit.

If one accepts the overwhelming quality of helplessness in the undeveloped

SLUMS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOP-

world, then any attempt, however small, to improve the quality of existence, is to be encouraged. Pilot projects and dem- onstration grants-experiments all-have a built-in bias: The designer has the will and determination that something good must happen. If only more of us would become designers I

Conservation

FORNIA LANDSCAPE. By Samuel E. Wood and Daryl Lembke. California Tomorrow, Forum Building, Sacramento 95814, 1967. 66 pp. $2.00.

THE FEDERAL THREATS TO THE CALI-

This is an angry book. I t is a worthy sequel to two earlier, equally angry pub- lications, California Gokg, Going . . . and The Phantom Cities of California, published by the same organization.

California Tomorrow has assumed the near hopeless task of telling the people of the Golden State that they had better wake up to the fact that one of the nation’s largest, richest and most beautiful states is being prostituted, and that something had better be done soon.

It is ironic, or tragic, that the western states have been unable to learn from the mistakes of the east. All the errors com- mitted by New York and New Jersey 30 years ago are being repeated, with a vengeance, in California today. If the state ever becomes as densely populated as New Jersey, it would have 128 million people-a fourth again larger than Japan, the world‘s fifth most populous nation.

As an angry book, this one does tend, on occasion, to get a little carried away. What might be considered the occasional polemic is easily forgiven, however, as the mass of factual data mounts in the case against Uncle Sam. The failure to con- sider the full impact of many federal