Customer Reviews

Utopian Dreams

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Tobias Jones here chronicles a year of searching for "community"; what exactly he sought under this name never becomes completely clear. He disdains for the most part the comfortable exoticism he might have used in superficial accounts of hippie-esque communes, at least after he spends an unsatisfying (and unsatisfied) first chapter detailing a visit to Damanhur, an Italian center of profitable new-age mumbo-jumbo. After this he gravitates away from alternative culture and toward religious communities, and the most interesting segment of the book deals with his time at Nomadelfia, a decades-old Italian village community which seems at once shockingly radical as a utopia of shared labor and shockingly reactionary in its ardent Catholicism. Subsequent chapters chronicle time spent at a couple of British communities as well; a Quaker-influenced retirement community is a bit of a strange fit with the rest of the book, but places that focus on helping -- and preaching to -- marginal or homeless people, recovering criminals and addicts, in Britain make up most of the rest of this short book.

Jones is an apt and interesting reporter when he focuses on description of what is around him, but all too often he veers (in the standard vein of bad travel writing) toward narcissistic introspection -- or, even worse, into facile and trite social analysis. Parts of this book become almost intolerable in their glib overgeneralizing about modern (or "postmodern") society's alleged overreliance on "choice" and "freedom" and its supposedly destructive secularism. This stuff may have been meaningful to Jones as he made his own personal journey, but it's absurdly simplistic and also just dull as social thought. So Jones's weakness for the clichés of stock conservative what's-wrong-with-the-secular-state talking points almost neutralizes his insight into the concrete details of the surroundings he so movingly inhabits elsewhere in the book. But there are still worthwhile things to be found here for readers generous enough to overlook Jones's faults as a thinker and to credit his talents as a reporter; I am particularly glad to have read his account of Nomadelfia in all its contradictory richness.