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.
Download and start listening now!
"Recommended for readers interested in travel writing, environmentalism, and U.S. history."
— Library Journal
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Erik Reece is the author of Lost Mountain, for which he won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s John B. Oakes Award and the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award for environmental writing. His work appears regularly in Harper’s, Orion, The Nation, and Oxford American. He lives in Kentucky, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
James Patrick Cronin began his audiobook career at twelve years of age opposite Christopher Lloyd in The Pagemaster. An Earphones Award–winning narrator, he has recorded over one hundred audiobooks across an extensive range of genres. A classically trained stage actor with an MFA from the University of Louisville and a degree in philosophy, he has spent his years since college performing as an actor and a comedian on stages all over the world. He has performed everything from the classics to original material in Ireland, Scotland, Serbia, and Israel, as well as all across the United States.