Man, I was so excited for this, which makes it doubly disappointing that it didn't quite pan out. It looks really great on the surface and totally up my alley; an authoritative but accessible survey of utopian and communal communities in North America since the Colonial era. And it does cover most of that ground and impart lots of interesting and useful information, but unfortunately the good is mostly overwhelmed by how distractingly bad the prose and organizational structure are. We're talking undergrad research paper bad, at least in places.

They do completely puzzling things like diving in and spending the first 2-3 pages of a chapter about a given group on minutia and details as if we already know the whole story about them, and only then backing up and doing the basic introduction on who they were, what their ideals and situation were, and all of the pertinent information you would need to understand the stuff in the first few pages. Everything is all haphazard and out of order and at times it devolves almost into non-sequiturs. And the prose is clunky and awkward in general, and was constantly tearing me out of the narrative and distracting me from what I was supposed to be learning.

The analysis also verges on new-agey nonsense at times, and I could have done without the dimestore philosophizing about how consumer society sucks and thus we need utopias, etc. A lot of that is at undergrad level as well.It's shame, because there's a lot of interesting stuff in here, and the research seems generally good and original, if a bit spotty in places.

I would have preferred a more on the fringe-ier utopian strains that devolved into cultish or worse behavior, like Koreshanity, Jonestown, and the 90's era with the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and the communitarian parts of the Christianist/militia movement, as those are on the continuum and need to be included in an accounting of utopian history in America.Mostly, I just wish it had been better written and organized. You should still read it if you're really interested in utopian and intentional communities, but be prepared for a bit of a slog. ( )