Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam
Published 2000 · 544 pages · 160,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is Bowling Alone to read?
Bowling Alone scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Social science terminology. Accessible to general readers.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Social capital theory grounded in extensive survey data.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with statistical evidence and sociological analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Direct, thesis-driven argument supported by data.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Bowling alone is the central metaphor. Otherwise analytical.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest, data-driven tone.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Putnam offers partial solutions but the problem persists.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Five parts with extensive data analysis.
How Bowling Alone is regarded
Bowling Alone holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.