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

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 couldnt 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 Americas 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.. … an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers. - Publishers Weekly