Utopia Drive, Erik Reece
Utopia Drive, Erik Reece
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Utopia Drive
A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea

Author: Erik Reece

Narrator: James Patrick Cronin

Unabridged: 13 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/09/2016


Synopsis

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.

About Erik Reece

Erik Reece is the author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness; Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia; and An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God. He has also written for Harper's Magazine, the Nation, and Orion Magazine. He is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he teaches environmental journalism, writing, and literature.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Janice

Loved this road trip review about American's utopian communities. If you don't have the time to read the entire book make sure you DO make time to read the last chapter, titled "What If?" In fact you should read it twice. But I recommend the entire book, lots to think about at this time of unrest an......more

I've always been completely fascinated with utopias, and I've secretly longed to join one or start one. I'm a natural reader for this little travel narrative then, as the author takes us on a road trip (a small one) through all the utopias and former utopias that are or were located close to his hom......more

Goodreads review by Jeff

Utopia Drive reads like a podcast I'd love to listen to. The conceit is fairly basic, where a writer is visiting a series of historically Utopian villages and communes in the United States over a period of time, giving a bit of history as well as present-day affairs in many cases, and providing thos......more

Goodreads review by Casey

The grim state of our nation/ daimon/ break the trance/ yarrow, tansy, wormwood and lavender/ the atheneum/ revelations 12:6/ there's nothing like a dream to create the future/ a peaceable revolution/ exponential growth/ war machine economists/ what I have is better than what you have/ utopian think......more