Review of Utopia Drive

A rather forlorn photo of a town-limit sign reading "Utopia" is the frontispiece of Utopia Drive by Erik Reece.Seems there really is such a place, along the Ohio River in my home state of Ohio, and Reece visited it in his quest to find just what "utopia" means.His ramblings took him, in the space of two weeks during the fall of 2015, to such well-known communal sites as the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, to New Harmony, Indiana, and to the Oneida Mansion House, along with lesser-known places like Modern Times (now Brentwood), New York, and the above-mentioned Utopia, Ohio, both begun by Josiah Warren to test his theory of "equitable commerce."Reece sampled the currentday communities of Twin Oaks and its sister site, Acorn, as well as an artist collective in Crown Heights, New York.In between, he visited the Abbey Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and Walden Pond in Massachusetts to think about "the utopia of solitude."Each chapter describes the community or communities visited, all with historic sketches of the people who lived there and why they sought the communal life, interspersed with Reece's own musings on how we can take the experiences of these groups and apply them to what he sees as the ills of today's "shareholder economy."Reece starts his journey "to find the holy grail of the secret of society" at Pleasant Hill, near his home in northern Kentucky (6).He does a good job describing the history and theology of the Shakers.He concludes that the Shakers did not fail in their mission-that, with them,