I hate to say something negative about a book, but this book was not a good guide to living a life of voluntary simplicity.
To give the author credit for truth in advertising, though, right on the back of the book the review reads "Grigsby looks inside the movement at the daily lives of participants and includes their own accounts of their efforts. She also uses reflexive empirical analysis to explore race, class, and gender in relation to the movement."
The book reads like a grad-student thesis on a movement. Grigsby uses long sentences and references almost excessively. For example, a paragraph from page 93 begins "In mixed gender circles, which are most common, men end up coopting circle agendas over time, drawing them back toward a masculine competitive pattern of relating, and establishing themselves as experts and leaders. I theorize that this occurs because of interaction of the following factors: (1) the power men hold over women through the present configurations of institutional structures (Acker 1988, 1990; Dixon 1997; Ferguson 1984; Kleinman 1996; Milkman 1988; Walby 1990) and their desire to both create change and retain power; (2) the poverty of the cultural gender repertoires available ...." This is fine for a dissertation, but I believe most people who start reading about voluntary simplicity would prefer a discussion of what they can do to live more ethically on our planet, not a review of what academics think about voluntary simplicity.
Thus, in summary I would say that this is a fine description of the voluntary simplicity movement from the point of view of a scholarly observer. Given what it is, this is not a bad book. The reader might be disappointed, though, if you order the book expecting a guide to living within the philosophy of voluntary simplicity.
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