A City Year: On the Streets and in the Neighborhoods with Twelve Young Community Service Volunteers.

• Author: Pink, Daniel H.

National service, once a flaky idea peddled only by The Washington Monthly and a few cranky neoliberals, has hit the big time.

Bill Clinton says national service will be a defining idea of his presidency. He promised to usher in a "season of service," and has created a White House Office of National Service to turn that promise into a reality.

Into this congenial climate comes Suzanne Goldsmith's firsthand account of nine months with City Year, the highly regarded Boston-based project that's a prototype for the national service programs Clinton envisions. The brainchild of Alan Khazei and Michael Brown, whose Harvard law degrees did not quash their entrepreneurial instincts, City Year is a privately funded service corps in which young people work in small teams on projects like building playgrounds, restoring housing, tutoring children, or assisting the elderly. City Year participants earn $100 per week, and if they stay an entire nine months, they receive $5,000 for college or job training. To writer her book, Goldsmith labored alongside a City Year team and talked at length with its members.

She began her City Year on a team that demonstrated one of the program's greatest strengths: diversity. (At the risk of being labeled a bean counter, I note that her team had six women, six men, two Latinos, four African-Americans, two Asian-Americans, three middle-class whites, a few college students, and a man on probation.) The crew was officially known as the Reebok Team, after the Massachusetts footwear company which supplied part of the uniform all City Year corps members must wear.

The Reebok Team's first projects were worthwhile. Team members excavated a weed-choked garden and playground complex in a beleaguered south Boston neighborhood, repainted a playground in Roxbury, and did chores for the elderly in a Charlestown public housing project. Then it was on to a state hospital to repair a greenhouse.

But difficulties quickly arise. Most tragically, one corps member is shot and killed one night as he walks home. And while some corps members hurl themselves into their work, others do little but complain loudly. Absenteeism ad lateness are chronic. Several corps members often disappear for the afternoon or spend work days chatting on the phone.

What makes the shirking and skipping hard to understand is that the Reebok Team doesn't work that much anyway.

For example, one of the group's projects was to organize a Community Clean-Up Day in the...