Main Street Blues The Decline of Small Town America free essay sample

A critique of the sociological work by Richard O Davies, entitled Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small Town America. The author evaluates the work by Richard O Davies that traces the decline of small town America. He looks first at the books shortcomings and then looks at the positive contributions to scholarship on sociology of American small town life made by O Davies work. Conclusions about the books worth are made at the end of the paper. Richard O Davies book on Main Street Blues: The Decline Of Small Town America is both narrow and sweeping in its scope. It is narrow in the sense that to validate its central thesis, that close-knit small town communities in America have become a thing of the past, it chooses to mainly focus upon life within one particular community. Rather than to attempt to do a sociologic study of a large number of communities, Davies centers his focus upon the particular, rather than upon the general. We will write a custom essay sample on Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small Town America or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page He does introduce as a way of a counter to his case study of Camden, Ohio, several other communities that he believes are exceptional to the central thesis of his work. However, the main focus of his book is always on a single town, that of the authors original hometown of Camden.