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For its insights, its readability, and even its flaws, Ethan Watters' forthcoming memoir "Urban Tribes" promises to be a sociological classic for years to come. Flaws are important, of course, because they give hard-working sociology professors fodder for their ravening hordes of students to devour, honing everyone's critical skills in the process.

The principal flaw of Urban Tribes [buy at amazon] ., and it's an annoying one, is that Watters fails to define the scope of a tribe, or the context of what he asserts as the defining fact of the study. While saying 'The numbers can't be ignored, the current generation of oung Americans is delaying marriage longer than any other generation in history,' Watters makes absolutely no effort to tell you what these numbers are, to give a baseline year for comparison, or even to define the term 'generation.'

Occasionally Watters commits the unforgiveable statistical sin of citing proportions without baselines, to wit: "The facts were certainly dramatic: the proportion of never-married women between 20 and 24 had doubled in thirty years while in the same time the proportion of never married between 30 and 34 had tripled." Dramatic facts indeed, but (leaving aside the question of just which 30-year period he is talking about: we never find out) perhaps the proportions were not too large to begin with. Or perhaps they were.

In fact I spent a good deal of time trying to determine how old he was and how long he had been 'living tribal', because aside from two central dissimilarities, his tribal generation sounded pretty much like my tribal generation.

Those two differences are instructive. One is, of course, the role of the internet. Watters got started on this project after he wrote a magazine article on Urban Tribes and appeared on a TV morning show, then returned home to find about 500 emails from strangers about their own urban tribal experience. (This must have been before the big spam explosion of 2002, otherwise the book would never have gotten conceived. He would have just deleted the messages).

He writes of his own tribe: "We constantly kept track of each other in a never-ending e-mail thread. On an average week, among my group of twenty friends, there were hundreds of one-to-one e-mails, a dozen group e-mails, and perhaps fifty phone calls exchanged."

The book's genuine insights and colorful cultural anecdotes make it well worth dodging past whatever statistical howlers and minor illiteracies haven't been eliminated by publication time.

In addition to the many supportive tribes he encounters, Watters paints a wonderful picture of several instances of mal-adaptive urban tribes, including how a tribe based on cocaine eventually fails, and how his own experience a gambling addiction is ignored and mis-characterised by his friends.

Countless examples of romantic cues and mis-cues are presented, which should make for great reading in Sociology of the Family, Small Groups, or Basics of Social Organization.

Watters' visit to another urban tribal group near Philadelphia presents one of the most fundamental insights of the book: he is at the meeting, he knows exactly what's going on, and he can't even identify the tribe, even though he knows it's there. It just looks like fifty people, in groups of twos and threes, trading gossip. He thinks, well, this is just so quotidian. These people aren't doing anything special at all. It's not like MY tribe. But wait! It is! That's what WE do, we gossip.

I'm sure one of the reasons Urban Tribes will be successful is that people like to think of themselves as being in a tribe, rather than in a gossip group. If he named this book "Gossip Groups," do you think it would do nearly as well?

A nice inclusion in the book is a treatment of Robin Dunbar's work on the size of groups, both human and chimpanzee. It's only about four pages, but it really makes the connection between gossip, grooming, chimpanzees, and human group sizes. Members of one of the tribes he talked to cut each others' hair; he doesn't make the connection explicitly with chimpanzees' mutual grooming, because he does not need to.

Perhaps best of all, Urban Tribes will stand as a counterweight to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.In chapter 4, How Tribes Connect a City, he completely trashes Putnam's doom-and-gloom scenario of a fragmented and isolated population, pointing out some of the darker aspects of Putnam's supposedly stronger social organizations, while highlighting the strengths of the large numbers of weak social ties that tribes provide. He is probably making a big mistake in criticizing Putnam's statistical presentations, however, given that his own statistics are so bad. He and his tribal raiders had better hop into their Millenium Falcon-class ships, because you can bet that Putnam, after all a Harvard professor, will be cranking up his statistical Death Star as soon as he gets wind of 'Urban Tribes'.

The other central dissimilarity between his tribe and mine is that in his tribe, people put huge amounts of energy into communication with each other, whether their ties are weak or strong. While I, at this juncture, am going happily to sleep.