Synopses & Reviews
Many fantasize about dramatically changing their lives — living in accordance with their ideals rather than the exigencies of job, bills, and possessions. William Powers actually does it. In his book Twelve by Twelve, Powers lived in an off-grid tiny house in rural North Carolina. In New Slow City, he and his wife, Melissa, inhabited a Manhattan micro-apartment in search of slow in the fastest city in the world. Here, the couple, with baby in tow, search for balance, community, and happiness in a small town in Bolivia. They build an adobe house, plant a prolific orchard and organic garden, and weave their life into a community of permaculturists, bio-builders, artists, and creative businesspeople. Can this Transition Town succeed in the face of encroaching North American capitalism, and can Powers and the other settlers find the balance they’re seeking? Dispatches From the Sweet Life is compelling, sobering, thought-provoking, and, no matter the outcome, inspiring.
Review
“We need every reminder we can get of the possibilities of transformation — here’s a community you’ll want to know about, and hopefully to emulate!” Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Review
“Bill Powers is a wonder, a brilliant and bighearted writer able to transform the most ordinary moments of daily life into exquisite epiphanies, rich with discovery. Dispatches From the Sweet Life charts the luminous frustrations and giddy pleasures awaiting all those who choose to opt out of the high-speed addiction to progress, allying themselves instead with a real community immersed in the life of the animate earth. Powers is a one-of-a-kind reporter bringing necessary news from that mysterious edge where our gorgeous ideals meet the parched and rock-strewn soil of reality.” David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
Review
“A compelling tale of leaving Manhattan to embed in a small, rural Bolivian town with all its wonders, differences, and commonalities. Dispatches From the Sweet Life is the vivid personal chronicle of a bold adventure in search of sustainable development — and pondering what really matters.”
Thomas E. Lovejoy, professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University and former chief biodiversity advisor at the World Bank
About the Author
William Powers has worked for two decades in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and North America. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the community components of a project in the Bolivian Amazon that won a 2003 prize for environmental innovation from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. Powers has worked at the World Bank and holds international relations degrees from Brown and Georgetown. A third-generation New Yorker, Powers has also spent two decades exploring the American culture of speed and its alternatives in some 50 countries around the world. He has covered the subject in his four books and written about it in the Washington Post and The Atlantic. Powers is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and an adjunct faculty member at New York University. His website is www.williampowersbooks.com.
William Powers on PowellsBooks.Blog
My howl for help echoes into the silence. Incensed, I kick a rock, which sails over the edge of the bluff upon which I’m marooned and tumbles toward the river below...
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