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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) Kindle Edition
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road.
When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPublicAffairs
- Publication dateSeptember 15, 2020
- File size2458 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
―Publishers Weekly
"An entertaining sendup of idealistic politics and the fatal flaws of overweening self-interest."
―Kirkus
"[Hongoltz-Hetling] reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history....The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling."
―The New Republic
"Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so darkly comedic, with such a defined sense of place and filled with characters that range from the fascinating to the bizarre to the earnest, that partway through reading, it hits you: This has got to become a Coen brothers movie...Hongoltz-Hetling is a master of the turn of phrase. His voice is breezy and critical, with a finely tuned eye aimed at the absurdities as well as at the earnestness of the Free Town Project."
―Star Tribune
"Since the beginning, Americans have been fighting about the balance between individual liberty and the common good. Hongoltz-Hetling shows what can happen when one rural New Hampshire town went to the libertarian extreme in this madcap tale that zig-zags between tragedy and farce, with the possibility of being eaten."―Colin Woodard, New York Times-bestselling author of American Nations and Union
"A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is a finely drawn portrait of one freedom-loving town, and a joyful romp through the dark corners of the American psyche. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a gifted writer with a high-powered radar for the strange details of American life. He skillfully portrays the dreamers and eccentrics who populate Grafton, and the bears lurking just beyond its treelines. At turns hilarious and alarming, this story had me firmly in its jaws from the opening pages."―Evan Ratliff, author of The Mastermind
"Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's wild and wonderful blend of small-town America and large-scale ideals, imparted with humor and insight reminiscent of Sarah Vowell and Bill Bryson, is an unpredictable and endlessly fascinating feat of immersive reporting, filled with singular characters and doughnut-eating bears."―Michael Finkel, bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B083J1FXY8
- Publisher : PublicAffairs (September 15, 2020)
- Publication date : September 15, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 2458 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 305 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #100,676 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Local U.S. Politics
- #8 in State & Local Government
- #13 in History of New England U.S.
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors.
His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere.
He lives in New England.
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The story of the Libertarian movement in Grafton, New Hampshire followed a somewhat predictable rise and fall: early enthusiasm giving way to a collapse under its own anarchic weight.
For someone like me who enjoys the sociological and systems elements of society, it’s a great case study. Also, the characters were quite colorful and vividly depicted.
Turns out a movement centered on “personal liberty” has a hard time getting its followers to cooperate and actually make it happen; largely because everyone’s definition of the goal is different.
It seems like most of the “Free Town” migrants weren’t interested in total freedom but wanted to enjoy the benefits of a civil society while being exempt from paying the taxes that support that society, and exempt from specific laws that prohibit their personal peccadillos.
The book chronicles them objecting to taxes, challenging authority with lawsuits at every turn, and generally using their selfish assholery to reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of anyone working to build a mutually supported and mutually beneficial society.
It was an inexorable race to the bottom made especially obvious by comparison to neighboring towns.
The book took an unexpected turn in suggesting a gut parasite acquired from cats may be contributing to increased risk-taking behavior in both bears and humans. But the way it’s told is surprisingly compelling and I can see why the author included it.
I absolutely love the word play built into a very memorable page in Book Two, Chapter Nine of the September 2021 paperback edition. What seemed like an innocent juxtaposition was followed by another and then confirmed as intentional with yet another. In re-reading for these notes, I now see at least four! Very clever.
To be fair, Grafton was somewhat quirky before the libertarians arrived. For example, it's fire department wasn't created until after WWII, decades after other communities had fire departments. But still, the pioneering libertarians took this quirkiness and dialed it to 11. This book is the entertaining but sad story of that transformation.
Let's talk about bears. New Hampshire, or so I learned, had always had a bear problem. Given the collapse of New England agriculture (94% of Grafton's farmland had been allowed to go wild) bear population was on the rise. But the libertarian culture made things worse, whether it was from people living in RVs with non-bearproof garbage cans to people actually feeding bears. (One of the characters in the book, the "doughnut lady" was feeding bears in her back yard, including doughnuts as treats.)
This lack of control has not gotten anybody killed yet. Not for lack of trying on the bear's part, mind you. They are no longer scared of humans and so there have been several bear attacks. Just due to sheer luck, no human has died from an attack, although several have been seriously mauled.
The subject of this book, a self-induced collapse of a town, is not a light subject and so it's not entirely a light read. It is an interesting read, and well-constructed.