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Sebastian Ritscher
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A LIBERTARIAN WALKS INTO A BEAR

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears.
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road, turned that plan into reality.

Public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws didn't disappear, but they got quieter: meek suggestions barely heard in the town's thick wilderness.

The bears, on the other hand, were increasingly visible. Grafton's freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city, in an effort to get off the grid. And with a large and growing local bear population, conflict became inevitable.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is both a screwball comedy and the story of a radically American commitment to freedom. Full of colorful characters, puns and jokes, and one large social experiment, it is a quintessentially American story, a bearing of our national soul.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.
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Book

Published 2020-09-15 by Pubic Affairs

Comments

An entertaining sendup of idealistic politics and the fatal flaws of overweening self-interest.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling in Conversation with Andrew Keen on the Keen On Podcast - On today's episode, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, journalist and author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, discusses what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Read more...

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's wild and wonderful blend of small-town America and large-scale ideals, imparted with humor and insight reminiscent of Sarah Vowell and Bill Bryson, is an unpredictable and endlessly fascinating feat of immersive reporting, filled with singular characters and doughnut-eating bears.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so darkly comedic, with such a defined sense of place and filled with characters that range from the fascinating to the bizarre to the earnest, that partway through reading, it hits you: This has got to become a Coen brothers movie... Hongoltz-Hetling is a master of the turn of phrase. His voice is breezy and critical, with a finely tuned eye aimed at the absurdities as well as at the earnestness of the Free Town Project.

Since the beginning, Americans have been fighting about the balance between individual liberty and the common good. Hongoltz-Hetling shows what can happen when one rural New Hampshire town went to the libertarian extreme in this madcap tale that zig-zags between tragedy and farce, with the possibility of being eaten.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling appeared on The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder to talk about his new book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town Read more...

[Hongoltz-Hetling] reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history... The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Read more...

France: Arthaud ; Japan: Hara Shobo ; Poland: Krytyka Polityczna

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is a finely drawn portrait of one freedom-loving town, and a joyful romp through the dark corners of the American psyche. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a gifted writer with a high-powered radar for the strange details of American life. He skillfully portrays the dreamers and eccentrics who populate Grafton, and the bears lurking just beyond its treelines. At turns hilarious and alarming, this story had me firmly in its jaws from the opening pages.

Sean Illing/ Vox: I reached out to Hongoltz-Hetling to talk about his book. I wanted to know what happened in New Hampshire, why the experiment failed, and what the whole saga can teach us not just about libertarianism but about the dangers of loving theory more than reality.... Read more...

A LIBERTARIAN WALKS INTO A BEAR (on 9/15/20) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling was included in the BBC Science Focus best books of 2020 list. They list the book as "an alarming, eyebrow-raising and often hilarious true life tale of what happens when a fringe political ideology clashes with the real world, in ways which incorporate economics, conservation, zoology, parasitology, environmentalism, various types of psychology and animal behaviour studies, and more." Read more...

[A] witty and precisely observed debut... Hongoltz-Hetling skillfully probes shortcomings and ironies in the libertarian philosophy... The result is an entertaining and incisive portrait of political ideology run amok. Read more...