A short book that argues that local community is the antidote to everything that ails society right now. The focus is on locally grown food, connection through conversations, engagement in civic life, meeting and loving people who are different from you because they are part of your physical community.

This is by far the most successful of the suite of books I've been reading the past few years that try to imagine how we can get ourselves to a "better" (less demanding, less constrained, less angry, less depressed) world. There are tangible actions to be found here, and the prescription has the resonance of truth. That said, the author is enough of a stereotype that I have some reservations (white girl who got to know a remote people during the '70s and made it her life's work to proselytize for their unmodernized culture). ( )