Free eBooks Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea Available To Downloads
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.
File Size: 1138 KB
Print Length: 369 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0374106576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 9, 2016)
Publication Date: August 9, 2016
Sold by: Macmillan
Language: English
ASIN: B01ARSJKN2
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #380,013 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #44 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Utopian #181 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism #777 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism
We've all taken solitary walks to think through difficult questions, sometimes pausing to consult friends or mentors for advice. Utopia Drive is University of Kentucky writer-in-residence Erik Reece's version of that walk in search of the cure for America's income inequality, social strife and environmental degradation. Given Reece's style - a fan of burgers and baseball who, when offered a free drink, opts for a double martini - and the scope of his quest, his natural method of travel is a pickup truck outfitted with a boxful of CDs. Reece roams from New Harmony, Indiana to the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts to discover what the successes and failures of historic and current utopian communities can teach about how society can become more fair and sustainable.Many scholarly books have been written about the Shakers, Robert Owen's New Harmony, the Oneida community and other utopian ventures, but this approach differs in that it is neither a strict economic case study nor a deep sociological analysis. Rather, it's an ongoing train of thought about democracy, human rights, stewardship of the earth and how religion and the nuclear family affect the success of communities. This book could have been drudgery, but the eccentricities and foibles of places he visits, such as the contemporary, highly disciplined Twin Oaks community in Virginia and its spinoff, the free-wheeling Acorn community, keep the narrative interesting. The Shakers, for example, were led by Mother Ann Lee, who settled the tension between family and community by banning sex, while the Oneida community, led by John Humphrey Noyes, attempted to resolve the same issue by encouraging sex among all members of the community.
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