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Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. By Sterling F. Delano. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2004. xx, 428 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01160-0.)
Sterling F. Delano's Brook Farm aims to present the first "comprehensive examination" of Transcendentalist George Ripley's design to construct the "city of God" on a dairy farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts (pp. xii-xiii). Ripley's grand experiment in community building was largely a failure; Brook Farmers eked out a precarious living for all of six years from 1841 to 1847. By contrast, Delano's effort at attaining his necessarily more modest historical objective is far more successful. His book achieves a scrupulously thorough account of Brook Farm from its roots in Ripley's disaffection from the Unitarian ministry in the late 1830s through the community's brief afterglow in the Boston Religious Union of Associationists under the leadership of William Henry Channing.
Delano stresses, as...