We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

In this deep study, Daloz, who grew up in a back-to-the-land community in Vermont, looks at how these communities rose and fell, as well as where they succeeded and went awry. In the 1970s, thousands of Americans abandoned urban areas to establish communes where they lived off the land, embracing a hippie or idyllist lifestyle and looking to return to a more naturalistic, peaceful existence. "The 1970s remain the only time in the nation's history when more people moved to rural areas than into the cities," Daloz writes, "reversing two hundred years of steady urbanization." This trend was a callback to the utopian communities and experimental societies of the 18th and 19th centuries, and it helped to define a generation. By focusing much of the narrative on a group called Myrtle Hill Farm, Daloz gives an intimate look into their social dynamics and experiences, putting names and faces on the ambitions, hopes, and failures of the back-to-the-land movement. Daloz's voice is distant and lacks passion, keeping the reader at bay despite a wealth of details granted through experience and interviews. Still, this is an informative look at an era that laid the groundwork for the modern organic movement and its relatives. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM. (May)