Business, Community & Peacemaking

The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which progress has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.

Intimate and evocative, this book profiles ten men and women who have left mainstream life in urban Japan to live their lives simply and sustainably, in harmony with their environment, surrounded by the luxuries of nature, art, friends, delicious food, and an abundance of time.

Liberals worldwide invoke Scandinavia as a promised land of equality, while most conservatives fear it as a hotbed of liberty-threatening socialism. But the left and right can usually agree on one thing: that the Nordic system is impossible to replicate elsewhere. The US and UK are too big, or too individualistic, or too . . . something.