Chris Jennings grew up in New York City. He graduated from Deep Springs College and Wesleyan University. He lives in Northern California with his dog.
“Uncommonly smart and beautifully written . . . [Chris] Jennings’s
sure grasp never falters. The result is a triumph of scholarship
and narration: five stand-alone community studies and a coherent,
often spellbinding history of the United States during its
tumultuous first half-century. . . . Although never less than
evenhanded, and sometimes deliciously wry, Jennings writes with
obvious affection for his subjects. To read Paradise Now is to be
dazzled, humbled and occasionally flabbergasted by the amount of
energy and talent sacrificed at utopia’s altar. But then, as
Jennings so memorably puts it, ‘Anyone nuts enough to try building
heaven on earth is bound for a hell of his own making.’ ”—The New
York Times Book Review
“Writing an impartial, respectful account of these philanthropies
and follies is no small task, but Mr. Jennings largely pulls it off
with insight and aplomb. Indulgently sympathetic to the utopian
impulse in general, he tells a good story. His explanations of the
various reformist credos are patient, thought-provoking and . . .
entertaining.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Thoughtful, measured, and surprisingly relevant.”—Chicago
Tribune
“As a tour guide, Jennings is thoughtful, engaging and witty in the
right doses. . . . He makes the subject his own with fresh eyes and
a crisp narrative, rich with detail. . . . In the end, Jennings
writes, the communards’ disregard for the world as it exists sealed
their fate. But in revisiting their stories, he makes a compelling
case that our present-day ‘deficit of imagination’ could be
similarly fated.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Chris Jennings is a natural storyteller, and his Paradise Now, a
five-part chronicle of America’s nineteenth-century utopian
dreamers and doers, is the most clear-eyed, sympathetic, and
inspiring account I’ve read of this vital chapter in American
history in decades. What sort of future did they want? The Shakers,
Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Oneidans asked and answered
the question, each group in its own way. Chris Jennings prods
his readers to ask the question again—for ourselves.”—Megan
Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New
American Life
“Jennings knows how to tell a story, and has the intellectual range
to recover both the weirdness and wisdom of America’s brief bout
with utopian illusions and ideals.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of The
Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution,
1783–1789
“In a perfect world, work will be irresistibly pleasurable. Women
will have equal rights. Money and property will be shared, as will
spouses. Or maybe sex won’t be allowed at all? Even better! And
once the ice caps melt, the sea will taste like lemonade. Bliss!
With good humor, a lively style, and a deep knowledge of the
historical scholarship, Chris Jennings tells the goofy,
heartbreaking tale of nineteenth-century Americans who believed
they could bring about heaven on earth, and managed to live out
futures that the rest of us haven’t yet reached.”—Caleb Crain,
author of Necessary Errors
“Despite marked differences separating these utopian movements,
Jennings prizes in all of them their distinctive—and utterly
American—optimism in facing a future in which their adherents
believed they would usher in a glorious new social order. . . .
Readers who resent the constraints of a barren realism will value
this deep-probing inquiry into the quest for new social
possibilities.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Jennings proves an able guide to these groups. [His] comprehensive
research makes for absorbing reading as he shows how different
people attempted to find perfection and how they failed or
succeeded.”—Kirkus Reviews
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