A journey through American utopian communities past and present, and a meditation on what we can learn from them.
Reece has a sharp eye for the contradictions of communities that condemn the capitalist economy but are sustained by vibrant commercial enterprises . . . [Utopia Drive] vividly bring[s] to life the ecological sensitivity, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism that inspired so many in early America.
- Akash Kapur, The New Yorker
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.
From the Shaker communities of Kentucky to modern-day cooperatives in the Northeast. . . . Ed Reece explores the history of the utopian impulse on American soil with a sense of urgency about the current moment in our country.
- Ray Suarez, NPR’s All Things Considered
An engaging exploration - and example - of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers.
- Publishers Weekly