William Palmer
The Road To Hell
Devastating Eden: The Search For Utopia In America
By Brian Thompson
HarperCollins 320pp £20 order from our bookshop
IN THE LAST century - under the three large-scale schemes to improve and regulate humanity led by Messrs Mao. Stalin and Hitler - many millions of innocent men. women and children were murdered. slavery was reintroduced, and whole cultures and peoples' were destroyed. Brim Thompson's new book describes an earlier and less disastrous experiment in human perfectibility.
Most people have heard of Robert Owen and think of him as some sort of early socialist and philanthropist; Devastating Eden shows that he was a rather different figure. He was born in 1771, left school at ten, and became a draper's assistant. Through single-minded hard work he became an
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind