Utopia Drive

A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea

By: Erik Reece

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

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.

©2016 Erik Reece (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Recommended for readers interested in travel writing, environmentalism, and U.S. history." ( Library Journal)

Audiobook misses a lot

I was confused b¥ the audiobook. A friend read the book and there's special layout and formatting that guides the reader. Unfortunately those "guides" don't exist with the narration...which was dry and boring. I had difficulty discerning his actual trip experiences and all of the history he piles on.