Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee--This is a fun, thought-provoking book about our ever-so-human attempts to create utopia and our ever-so-human failures at every turn. Ghodsee reviews two thousand years of communes, collaborative schools, rural and urban experiments, all trying to get at a "better" way of living. While the book is well-researched, much time is spent amplifying the successes of these experiments when it's possible a more edifying book would detail why these attempts didn't work out. Ghodsee is sometimes militantly evangelical in her approach, and she appears convinced that the glorification of the family unit is the primary thing that keeps us one step away from utopia. To that end, she brings up philosophers, revolutionaries, and, yes, cult leaders who have also decried the family unit. I think there's certainly something to what she's saying--what does it mean for the American political system to be focused on winning "middle class/working class families" (even if only in word, not in deed) rather than uplifting everyone through a communal approach? For me, though, I think this book convinced me that a society-level communal utopia isn't possible to strive for. Put another way, maybe the real utopia is the friends we made along the way. Thumbs up.