The last puritans.(Review)(Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia)(Book Review) From: Public Interest | Date: September 22, 2004| Author: Lawler, Peter Augustine | COPYRIGHT 2004 The National Affairs, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

BROOK Farm was the most visible, and in some ways most successful, of the many American secular utopian experiments of the 1840s. This decade, as Sterling Delano explains in Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia, ([dagger]) was one of our nation's most distinctive, infused as it was by the idea of the perfectibility of humanity. Delano's book is impressively researched but also, through no fault of his own, pretty boring. The "dark side" of the experiment just isn't very dark, consis...