Any new book by John Friedmann warrants the attention of planners. His contributions to the field have been notable, reflecting his active involvement in the practice of planning alongside a deep and critical sensitivity as an academic to theoretical and philosophical issues.... Friedmann presents his readers with separate sentences and paragraphs to ponder. These are liberally punctuated with a very personalized anthology of quotations ranging from Martin Buber to Heraclitus, T. S. Eliot to Mao Tse-Tong, and many other no less surprising juxtapositions in this kaleidoscope of the intellect.... This book confronts the reader with many dazzling provocations.
APA Journal
The author of eight other books and a consultant to several governments, Friedmann brings to this philosophical work impeccable credentials as a social-planning theorist and practitioner.... What emerges in Friedmann's account is a portrait of the small group that embodies the Good Society in its radical practice.... Like most of Paul Goodman's writings and like Illich's Celebration of Awareness, Friedmann's book sings sweetly of free, human, face-to-face communities that can be made now.
Winterthur Portfolio