Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

At a moment when "urban homesteading" is reviving in popularity, towns are changing zoning to allow backyard chicken husbandry, and farmer's markets are multiplying exponentially, this cursory study of the periodic waves of Americans returning to "the land" couldn't be more timely. Brown (Inventing New England) examines the literature of this recurring movement: Ten Acres Enough, written in response to the 1857 financial crisis; the turn-of-the-20th-century books promoting rural life as a defense against the "boom-bust cycle of industrial capitalism"; the Depression-era rural experiments, including Roosevelt's New Deal Subsistence Homestead project and socialist Jewish homesteading experiments; and the 1970s environmentalist-oriented back-to-the-land movement. Brown provides intriguing insights into the similarities among the movements and their promise and weaknesses, but his book wants for more careful selection%E2%80%94for example, Brown relies heavily on the stodgy Mother Earth News as her main 1970s source instead of the more important Whole Earth Catalogue. The scattershot collection of texts and omission of the voices of actual participants may also disappoint readers seeking deeper insight into the phenomenon. (July)