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    Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea
    Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea
    Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea
    Audiobook13 hours

    Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea

    Written by Erik Reece

    Narrated by James Patrick Cronin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 9, 2016
    ISBN9781515977933
    Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea
    Author

    Erik Reece

    ERIK REECE is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the author of several books including Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia.

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    Reviews for Utopia Drive

    3.5/5

    8 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      Uneven. He's at his best when visiting the sites of these "utopian" communities, describing and explaining their histories, philosophies, trajectories and - in most cases - failures. He's also very good when interviewing the people still actively involved in one way or another with these efforts - they are smart, dedicated, engaging people who are devoting their personal lives to a sometimes uncomfortable, difficult ideal. But then there are self-indulgent diversions into his passion for Cincinnati Reds baseball, and some very dry economic theory. I liked parts of it, and if you're interested in the Shakers (a particularly interesting chapter), Thomas Merton, Josiah Warren, or the not-very-harmonious New Harmony, IN, it may be best to develop a knack for skimming.