The State of Nonprofit America is a wide-ranging collection of essays that addresses how various types of nonprofits, from churches to nursing homes to museums, are faring in the current political climate. Editor Lester M. Salamon, a former deputy associate director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and currently the director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, is a well-known and prolific writer in the field, and he has pulled together an impressive group of contributors.

The essays cover a great deal of territory, starting with the historical beginnings of voluntarism in this country and moving on to the earliest private foundations and the origins of infrastructure organizations such as the Foundation Center. The information is posited against the political backdrop of the period, from the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, to the Reagan tax revolution of the 1980s, to welfare reform in the mid-'90s and the current faith-based initiatives of the Bush administration. Throughout, the book's main premise is that the relentless drive for more privatization and greater efficiency in all sectors of society has forced nonprofits to operate more and more like businesses — not least, by demonstrating their results and competing with each other. They're also having to make do with less: During the Reagan years, federal aid to nonprofits decreased by 25 percent, even as demand for their services, fueled by cutbacks in government programs, increased.

The volume's most informative chapters, in this reviewer's opinion, are chapter 10 ("Infrastructure Organizations," by Alan J. Abramson and Rachel McCarthy), chapter 11 ("Foundations and Corporate Philanthropy," by Leslie Lenkowsky), and chapter 12 ("Individual Giving and Volunteering," by Virginia Hodgkinson, with Kathryn E. Nelson and Edward D. Sivak, Jr.) —— although, after reading the book in its entirety, I was left with the sense that the narrative would have flowed better if these chapters, which provide an overview of the sector, had come at the beginning of the book, after Salamon's fine introduction ("The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America").

The book's other drawback is its considerable reliance on numbers and statistics. Still, some facts did jump out. From 1977 to 1997, for example, the nonprofit sector grew faster than the for-profit sector. Similarly, cutbacks in government funding have led many social service providers to "medicalize" themselves, since Medicaid has been left largely intact. And, in the international arena, although the United States appropriates more foreign aid than any nation other than Japan, that aid amounts to only 1 percent of gross national product, putting the U.S. in last place in terms of foreign assistance as a percentage of GNP.

Despite these minor shortcomings, The State of Nonprofit America should interest policymakers, public policy analysts, nonprofit leaders and practitioners, and anyone hoping to build a career in the sector. Moreover, it couldn't have arrived at a better time. While no new ground is broken by the collection, the rapidly changing interplay among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors merits frequent analysis. And with the federal government threatening greater cuts in funding for the states and proposing tax breaks that would further reduce incentives for the wealthy to give, we need to be reminded that the third sector, while resilient, cannot cure society's ills by itself. Ultimately, as Salamon and his fellow contributors argue, what is needed in these uncertain times is an intelligent and humane collaboration among business, government, and the nonprofit sector.