PUBLISHER's Choice
reviews
The Utopia
Experiment: Surviving
the Apocalypse but
Losing Your Mind
Dylan Evans
Picador • 987 1 4472 6138
This book, a true story, should be
an absolute must-read for anyone
harbouring fond notions about 'going
off-grid' and living in endless natural
bliss, sans virtually everything we take
for granted as part of 'modern life'.
Former robotics expert Evans decided
after a visit to the ruins of the Mayan
civilisation, to see, in real-time terms,
what it would be like for a group of
survivors of a more-or-less complete
collapse of Western civilisation who had
the 'good fortune' of foreseeing what
was coming, and who had already opted
out of 'modern life' and set up what
he called the Utopia Experiment. The
detailed journey that he and his group of
volunteers went on makes up the body
of the book. But beyond some success
in recreating 18th century pre-industrial
life aside, the cost for the author was
literally his sanity. He is not the first to
go down that rocky road. Around the
world, there have been hundreds of
such communities, set up for real, not
merely as an experiment, as in this case,
which have literally fallen to pieces in
short order – and most haven't even
tried to live fully 'off-grid'. The issues of
group and personal dynamics, driven
by underlying personal and personality
issues not properly processed and
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thought through by the participants,
seems almost always to be the cause
of the breakdown and break-up of such
ventures. It takes a great deal more than
a naïve longing for the allegedly (but
not actually) 'simpler life' of times gone
by to make such a community work.
In this case, the author lost everything,
including his psychological balance,
having sold his home to finance his
utopian adventure, which turned out to
be much more of a psycho-emotional
trial than expected. In the end, which is
where the book starts, it proved more
than he could handle, leaving him broke,
broken and self-hospitalised after barely
a year of 'post-apocalypse' living. Read
this one and think long and hard about
what really makes communities work
before launching into anything of its
kind.
The Optimist's
Handbook
Nick Inman
Harriman House • 978 19056 4129 1
Turn on the TV or radio, or do the
equivalent online and you'll be
overwhelmed by negative news. That's
because we are more connected
than ever, and there's a lot happening
everywhere. Some of it is about climate
change and what is associated with that
rapidly unfolding saga, which is mostly
inconvenient at best for us humans,
but which is escalating into something
much more than that. Other 'bad news'
elements include seemingly endless
scandals of corruption and abuse
reaching from the highest levels of
governments and corporations, through
the celebrity world, to every-day people.
Much of the news is simply about human
beings being human, which is