We have had a lot of popular surveys of American intentional communities in the last half century or so—from Robert Houriet’s Getting Back Together (1972) and Richard Fairfield’s Communes USA (1972) to David Bramwell’s The No. 9 Bus to Utopia (2016) and Erik Reece’s Utopia Drive (2017). This one differs from the majority of such works in that the communal traveler here was seeking guidance for a community she hoped to establish for herself, her husband, and friends. And indeed, in the end, she did cofound a startup community, the Mutual Aid Society, in New York State’s Catskills. The book also differs from most others in not being just a travelogue, but a memoir with frequent excursions into other parts of the author’s life.

So far so good. But the book deserves a mention in Nova Religio because some are likely to take it as a reliable source on the...

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