Utopia drive
Subtitle: a road trip through America's most radical idea
By: Erik Reece
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9780374106577
Subjects: Utopias; Communitarianism; Utopian socialism; History
Description: "For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. "--

"Eric Reece, author of Lost Mountain and An American Gospel, traces the history of the utopian movement in America and lays out a radical re-visioning of the future of utopian societies"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-346).
Table of contents: title: Nonesuch (Woodford County, Kentucky); title: The new creation (Pleasant Hill, Kentucky); title: Monk's Pond (Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery: Bardstown, Kentucky); title: A beautiful failure (New Harmony, Indiana); title: A simple act of moral commerce (Cincinnati and Utopia, Ohio); title: How should people live? (Twin Oaks: Louisa, Virginia); title: A clearinghouse for dreams (Utopia Parkway: Queens, New York); title: The Pine Barrens anarchists (Modern Times: Long Island, New York); title: Hunger not to have but to be (Walden Pond: Concord, Massachusetts); title: Some heartbreak, much happiness (Oneida, New York); title: What if? (Niagara Falls, Canada).