Richard Wizansky

I thought I was reading a book on homesteading, but it was really a sort of a source book on the 1960's and 70's by people who were there. Ray Mungo and his Liberation News Service, the 1968 Chicago riots, etc. They essentially started homesteading as part of an escape for the violence in the movements they had been part of.
A truly enjoyable read of a 'back to the land' project jointly written by several of the hippies involved. they come up against the tension between and mortgages and believing all property is theft, and they have to evict some happy squatters. They learn shared community needs shared views of good and evil, whether abstract, religious, material, or practical- although they continue to try to believe that good and evil are merely intellectual conceits and don't exist. They claim to believe there's nothing objectively better or best, but there is a common enemy against a common joy- not that they seem to learn this intellectually, but they have to adjust their lives to that reality. They learn sufferance, trust, forgiveness, through the school of hard knocks. Paul has some admonitions that could have helped them along the way.… (meer)