About Robert D. Putnam

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.  Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the British Academy.  In 2006, he received the Skytte Prize, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal, the nation's highest honor for contributions to the humanities.  Educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  He has written fourteen previous books, including the prize-winning American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us and the bestselling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community.

Putnam has been consulted by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, as well as national leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, and eslewhere, and grassroots activists around the world.  The Sunday Times of London has called him "the most influential academic in the world."  He lives in Jaffrey, New Hampshire and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the highly anticipated OUR KIDS: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster; March 10, 2015, $28), Robert D. Putnam offers a groundbreaking examination of why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility. 

It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success.  This is the America we believe ina nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort.   But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge.   Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life.  But now, Putnam argues, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was.   In OUR KIDS, Putnam offers a personal, but authoritative look at this crisis.