In Twelve by Twelve, Powers, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, took the first step to a sustainable lifestyle by living in an off-grid tiny house in rural North Carolina. New Slow City saw his return to Manhattan, where he and his wife moved into a micro-apartment. Now, in the third volume of Powers’s Beyond the American Dream series, he and his family decamp to Suraqueta, a subtropical town in Bolivia. There they build an adobe house alongside an orchard and join a community of like-minded bio-builders, beer brewers, artists, university students, and entrepreneurs. But the capitalist corporations are there as well, planning to mine and mall the place. Powers’s vivid and heartfelt narrative is all the more inspiring for its realistic portrayal of the challenges involved in escaping the unsustainable, mass consumer society.
