It’s comforting to curl up with a good back-to-the-land book and imagine ourselves living a charmed life outside of society’s strictures. That’s not this book. The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America is instead a realistic look at how three families worked—and worked incredibly hard—to create a better world, with varying degrees of success. Sundeen, a journalist and author of The Man Who Quit Money, examines the complex, painful and rewarding journeys of radical retreatants in Missouri, activist urban farmers in Detroit and no-nonsense homesteaders in Montana.

There are few easy answers in Sundeen’s telling of these diverse stories, which he neatly juxtaposes with his own reflections without stooping to the condescension that can creep into stories about the search for a better way. He visits the charismatic Ethan Hughes and his wife, Sarah Wilcox, at the Possibility Alliance in Missouri and is taken with their consensus-driven, computer-free lifestyle, yet admits to personally being seduced by convenience store rotisserie chicken and flashy sports car rentals. He shows us Detroit natives Olivia Hubert and Greg Willerer, growing vegetables in a downtrodden city where giving apples to the homeless only gives people fresh ammunition to lob at one another in the streets. And he brings us to the backyard skating rink of Montana’s Luci Brieger and Steve Elliot, who must run a tight ship to keep their 40-acre farm going, but don’t mind having a new truck in the driveway. 

Sundeen deepens his analysis by including economic data, historical perspective and literary references. Readers will hear not only from the expected writers like Wendell Berry but also from economist E. F. Schumacher and activist Malcolm X. Context is everything in this carefully and affectionately reported account of idealists working not to leave the real world behind, but to make it better.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Since the publication of Inquest, his 1966 critique of the Warren Commission’s report on the Kennedy assassination, Edward Jay Epstein has been probing events he believes were not sufficiently illuminated by the official investigations. He’s been particularly keen on examining the failures of America’s intelligence agencies, both at home and abroad. In How America Lost Its Secrets, he focuses on Edward Snowden’s massive looting and exposure of National Security Agency secrets. And, in Epstein’s mind, it does amount to looting, even though he agrees that Snowden performed a valuable service in alerting Americans to how broadly the NSA is spying on them. “Opening a Pandora’s box of government secrets is a dangerous undertaking,” he asserts.

A dogged researcher, Epstein retraces Snowden’s trajectory each step of the way from geeky teenager to opportunistic intelligence employee to celebrity whistleblower. However, Epstein doesn’t accept the widely held belief that Snowden is simply a whistleblower whose sole aim is to reveal the sinister side of America’s domestic intelligence gathering. He maintains that most of the documents Snowden copied and made public (or has threatened to make public) had to do with America’s spying on such potential adversaries as Russia and China. Further, he doesn’t believe Snowden acted alone in scooping up thousands of documents. He surmises—with some very persuasive reasoning—that Snowden must have had inside help and outside direction in deciding which intelligence files to raid. Epstein also goes to considerable lengths to explain why the government’s reliance on private, for-profit contractors to assist in its security work—such as the one that hired but failed to check out Snowden—is a built-in Achilles heel. 

In spite of the kaleidoscopic array of dates, places and characters Epstein has to deal with, his narrative is immensely readable and carries with it the dark sense of inevitability that flavors all good spy stories.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.