Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia Book

Or, How Not to Run a Utopian Community. Delano captures the joy and misfortune of Brook Farm, a commune that began as a Transcendentalist farm and ended as a failed socialist manufacturing "phalanx." The author makes compelling use of primary source quotations, to the point that the historical figures in question seem to be telling the story themselves. Keeping track of Fourierist socialist groups (all of them had acronyms for names) gets tricky by the end of the book, but the voices of Hawthorne, Emerson, and George and Sarah Ripley keep the narrative lively. We get a sense of the social networks, the mundane activities (so much manure shoveling!), and the utopian dreams of these New England eccentrics. This is really well done.