The unsettlers In search of the good life in today's America

Review by New York Times Review

THE UNSETTLERS: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, by Mark Sundeen. (Riverhead, $16.) Sundeen profiles three families - whom he calls pioneers, of a sort - who chose to live off the grid. They share an important commonality: "They had each taken on a fundamental aspect of how the world is broken, and had attempted, with all their might, to address it - in ways that felt sustainable, maybe even replicable." ENIGMA VARIATIONS, by Andre Aciman. (Picador, $16.) Aciman chronicles a lifetime of desire, love and loss. The central character, Paul, has an early infatuation with a craftsman in Italy that provides the story line's loose framework; the plot skips ahead to find him years later, nearly unrecognizable in an acrimonious relationship. Aciman's novel is a masterly portrayal of arousal and the selves forged by passion. LETTERS TO VERA, by Vladimir Nabokov. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. (Vintage, $20.) For over 50 years, Vera was a "song," a muse, a protector for her husband. (She was the one to save an early draft of "Lolita" after Vladimir tried to destroy it.) "It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation," our reviewer, Martin Amis, wrote, "and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy." LONG BLACK VEIL, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. (Broadway, $16.) It's August 1980, and a band of college friends are looking for mischief in an abandoned Philadelphia prison. But when one of them goes missing, the night ends in tragedy. Years later, the student's body is found, and one of the survivors risks exposing two long-held secrets to protect the truth. As our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, put it: "To the author, the prison is more than a setting, it's also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led." PRINCE CHARLES: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell Smith. (Random House, $20.) A sympathetic portrait of Charles comes down squarely in his favor, particularly with regard to Diana. He emerges as a thoughtful, intellectually driven man in Bedell's telling. The author, who has written at length about the royal family, offers a cleareyed view of the monarchy, its privilege and its faltering morals. ON TURPENTINE LANE, by Elinor Lipman. (Mariner, $14.99.) Faith Frankel is 32, perhaps more than a little bored, and has set down roots in her Massachusetts hometown. But mysterious objects in her new bungalow draw her into the neighborhood's past. Lipman's screwball romance is full of delightfully weird characters, from Faith's neo-hippie fiance to her father, an amateur artist churning out Chagall copies.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Sundeen went in search of the good life in America, and this is what he found: three drastically different stories of people who grew sick of America's consumption and environmental impact. From a rural outpost in Missouri, where a couple is raising their daughters without cars or electricity, to postapocalyptic Detroit, where people have turned vacant city lots to fields of alfalfa, to a Montana farm, where a married couple raised their children while successfully bringing about a food revolution, Sundeen has found prime examples of American ingenuity, passion, and frontier spirit. In this ode to self-reliance, Sundeen doesn't guilt readers into feeling bad for habits of consumption, but readers will certainly start to rethink their impact on the world. Writing with careful consideration for each individual situation, Sundeen is enthusiastic in his presentation and artfully weaves his own personal narrative throughout his interactions. The result is a book that is well researched, immediately engaging, immensely readable, and ultimately inspiring. This is the perfect read for DIY-types with dreams of saving the world, or at least their own backyards.--Brock, Emily Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sundeen (The Man Who Quit Money) embarks on a cross-country journey to find others invested in living a simpler life, and to discover how he and his wife, Cedar, can get closer to that experience. Sundeen visits three couples: Ethan and Sarah in La Plata, Mo.; Greg and Olivia in Detroit; and Steve and Luci in Victor, Mont. All of them have made a serious commitment to sustainable living; some live without electricity, and others grow food for themselves and their neighbors. The book suffers from a tone that veers into preachiness, and though Sundeen raises questions of privilege, his treatment of it is superficial. In Detroit, the book is at its most engaging. The work that Greg and Olivia put into their farm is arduous, but the way they talk about their work is less self-righteous than the other couples. Sundeen does ask important questions about technology, the economy, and the moral implications of being both critic and participant in our society. Still, readers will be left wondering what large-scale simple living might look like. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In recent years, going off the grid as a modern-day homesteader has become idealized after glamorized depictions in popular culture and on social media. However, homesteading loses its reality TV show sheen in the hands of Sundeen (The Man Who Quit Money), portraying this humble lifestyle choice as more gritty than romantic. From dirt roads in rural Missouri to Detroit's foreclosed streets, Sundeen reports how people throughout the United States have chosen to live simple but never simply. In the footsteps of Wendell Berry's classic The Unsettling of America, which offered a call to find one's roots and unsettle America, here we meet three couples who are willing to create their own vision of success. While never preachy, these pages will leave any reader with a penchant for sustainability to question their own carbon footprint. VERDICT An engaging read for those with an interest in sustainable -living, urban farming, and homesteading.-Angela Forret, Clive P.L., IA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Bright update on the perennial back-to-the-land movement.In this engaging, honest, and deeply personal account, Outside correspondent Sundeen (The Man Who Quit Money, 2012, etc.) tells the stories of three American families who have pursued alternative ways of living. Eschewing conveniences, materialism, and "the compromises of contemporary life," each has joined a movement consisting of "local food and urban farms, bike coops and time banks and tool libraries, permaculture and guerrilla gardening, homebirthing and homeschooling and home cooking." In researching their adventures in homesteading, Sundeen hoped to learn for himself how to lead a good life. Though his personal reflections meander, sometimes annoyingly, his superb reporting produces revealing portraits of modern hippies: Ethan Hughes and Sarah Wilcox, pursuing off-the-grid lives of secular utopianism and religious activism as farmers in the intentional community of Possibility Alliance in La Plata, Missouri; Olivia Hubert and Greg Willerer, working to create "a new economic model of food distribution" through Brother Nature Produce, an urban farm in violence-wracked Detroit; and Luci Brieger and Steve Elliott, a middle-aged farming couple in Victor, Montana, with three kids and a $40,000 yearly income, who have rejected the internet and popular culture in "uncompromising pursuit of an ethical life" in the local food movement. These unsettlers' early backgrounds vary from privileged to poor to hippie, but Sundeen shows how all take "true joy in work," seek constructive ways of living in society, and reap considerable rewards in their simple lives of voluntary poverty. The author is especially good at showing the difficulty of raising children in a connected society while wondering, as one iconoclast says here, "how do we fight the Man if we continue to buy his cheeseburgers?" He places these often inspiring, sometimes self-righteous families firmly in the American utopian tradition and traces the pervasive influences of authors from Tolstoy to Helen and Scott Nearing to Wendell Berry. Provocative reading for anyone who has ever yearned for a life of radical simplicity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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One I was looking for people freed from commercial civilization, who might give me direction for doing it myself. Yet after a full year, everyone I'd met fell into one of five categories, none of which was exactly right. First were single men. These guys had achieved self-reliance, but in cutting ties with the economy, they had also severed family bonds, the opposite of what I was on the verge of doing. I wanted blueprints for cohabitation, not hermitry. Next I met people who, after leading a simple life for some period of time, decided to quit--Cedar's parents, for example. After years of eking out a living growing food and selling stained glass at craft fairs, they both got full-time jobs and eventually replaced the barn with a beautiful on-grid home. "We took poverty as far as we could," her dad told me with a laugh. A friend of mine who birthed a baby in a school bus in a snowstorm on a mountain told me that tripping in the snow on the way to the outhouse one night--pregnant, shitting herself--was not what had finally nudged her and her husband to abandon the homestead. It was the prospect of driving the kids forty minutes to school each day. People who quit the simple life were the rule; I wanted the exceptions. In the third group were people who had launched their vision with considerable wealth or inherited land. I met a family who had deftly flipped a house in the suburbs before the crash, paid cash for acreage, and built an off-grid straw-bale house. I envied and admired them, but I couldn't afford to replicate what they'd done. Perhaps the most famous modern homesteader is Ree Drummond, who spun her massively popular Pioneer Woman blog into a series of books and TV shows that extol home cooking and homeschooling. But Drummond acquired her piece of paradise by marrying into a family that ranks among America's largest landowners. There were also those from a tradition of simple living, such as the Amish and the Mennonites. But you had to be born into such a culture. You couldn't just join. And then there were the moonlighters. Western Montana and southern Utah, where I'd lived for two decades, were meccas for back-to-the-landers, as were Vermont and Northern California. But those places were all expensive now, and buying in these days--or even staying afloat--required working an outside job to support a homestead hobby. I admired the commitment of those who'd figured out how to make it work. But for me a crucial motivation for living simply was to gain more freedom, not to sprint on some treadmill just to pay the bank. "What can I actually do?" asked the British economist E. F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful , in the face of intractable tentacles of industry. "In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers," he wrote, "modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man." Meanwhile, the wealthy were stripping the world of its cheap fuels at such a quick rate that poor countries would never get a fair share. Schumacher's solution: "We can, each of us, put our inner house in order." He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that "the essence of civilization was not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character." Instead of productivity for its own sake, Schumacher heralded the Buddhist ideal of "right livelihood," whose function he defined as threefold: to excel at one's craft, to overcome selfishness by working in common cause with others, and to create useful goods and services. Wendell Berry echoed this: "How can a man hope to promote peace in the world if he has not made it possible in his own life and his own household?" So after a year of searching for the people who had taken Wendell Berry's challenge to quit destructive technology, I found that I was equally interested in finding people who had taken his challenge to put their households in order. Where to find homesteaders more radical, more committed, yet less isolated than the ones I'd met thus far? Not personally knowing any, I launched my search--where else?--on Facebook. Through a short chain of acquaintances I learned about a place in Missouri, the Possibility Alliance. Some people I met at an anarchist collective told me they had gone there to launch a monthlong bike ride devoted to service--a ride they'd all done dressed as superheroes. But in these instantly searchable times, it was surprisingly hard to find out more. The alliance was shrouded in analog mystery: no website or social media, no major press coverage. Was it a commune or a school or an ashram or a summer camp or a training ground for revolutionaries? Gradually I gathered this much: Members of the Possibility Alliance used no electricity, cars, or computers. They lived by candlelight and grew their own food and rode bicycles and horses and trains. They lived in voluntary poverty rather than pay an income tax that financed war. Knowledge of the place spread by word of mouth. I eventually obtained a phone number--landlines don't require electricity--and after a series of messages spoke with Ethan Hughes, who, along with his wife, Sarah Wilcox, had founded the Possibility Alliance after they'd disembarked that Amtrak train in La Plata in 2007. He told me that the alliance hosted 1,500 visitors per year, some for a two-hour tour or a half-day course in canning or knitting, others for a weeklong natural-building workshop or a two-week permaculture course. "People pull up in the train and are picked up by horse and buggy or by bike," he said. "We call it 'necessary simplicity.' I don't know how to build another planet, but I know how to simplify. It creates a myth. In the age of the Internet, people get bored. There's this mystery. People track us down." I asked what sort of people showed up. "All kinds. Catholic Workers and anti-religious anarchists, permaculturists and Buddhists." At present they were so inundated with visitors that they could accommodate me only during "Experience Week." The price for the nine-day visit: zero. They operated strictly on the "gift economy." I asked what that meant. "I see objects and money like water," he said. "It's flowing. If in nature one tree kept all the water, everything downstream would die. By studying nature we see--" He stopped mid-sentence. "The bell of mindfulness just rang," he said. "Do you mind taking a moment of silence with me?" Excerpted from The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America by Mark Sundeen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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