A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

This was the rare book that was in equal parts hilarious and dismaying. The eternal human quest toward liberty and independence comes into the modern age, meeting the intractable forces of nature and raising many questions about whether we'll be able to survive the project. Most intriguing was the suggestion that the destructive, self-sabotaging behavior of both bears and humans may be related to a parasite causing damage in the brain. It's super ironic to think that the so-called “freedom” of the libertarians may be a mirage elicited by a tiny creature of which they have no knowledge, for all their pride in their own mental acuity. What is freedom anyway? It's not so simple as taking over a town, or a state, or a country, and subjecting it to your own selfish ideas. Here's hoping we can preserve some degree of mental health, and find some more workable solutions.

This was fine. Parts were interesting, but most of it just seemed... voyeuristic. The author tried at making the people seem sympathetic, but it just felt weird and unnecessary overall. The main takeaway is that libertarian policies can't actually run anything.

Just read this article instead. It's why I was interested in the first place, but it works better as an article than as a 250 page book.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project

A decent read, even if I did occasionally roll my eyes at the author's prose. When it works, it can be really funny and clever. But sometimes less is more. I don't know if the quotes-that-involve-the-word-bear at the beginning of every single chapter were really needed, same as some of the more fanciful wordsmithing deployed in the text.

Reading about characters as colorful as Grafton's is always interesting, and they are thankfully supplemented with discussions of (sadly not really with) relevant state authorities and their contributions to Grafton's bear problem. I was a bit taken aback by the chapter in which the author discusses the parasite Toxoplasma gondii as a possible culprite not just of the increasingly invasive bears but even some of the human behavior in the story. It appears out of nowhere and is then dropped and makes barely any re-appearance. I feel like you'd either want to more fully explore that train of thought or leave it out. This way just felt awkward.

Interesting Story, Superbly Written - Yet Too Much Conjecture. This is an extremely well written book that takes a look at the Free Town Project, an initiative that seems to have splintered from the main Free State Project. Indeed, it is this very point that shows Hongoltz-Hetling playing loose with the timeline, as throughout the text here the author tries to claim that FSP came after Free Town, even as he is quite clear that Free Town began in 2003 - after the creation of FSP. Instead, the author details an entertaining tale of a wild cast of characters in the New Hampshire wilderness while constantly belittling the very people he is portraying and ascribes to bears much more critical thinking capacity than he documents actual scientific research to support. When he does mention another major center of the FSP - Keene - it is only very late in the book and he tries to portray FSP's influence there as negligible at best, despite the wide prevalence of the Project there. Overall, the author's preference for the bears over many of the people he is writing about is quite abundantly clear, and it ultimately tarnishes the aftertaste of the book as a whole, even with the entertaining bear stories. Perhaps this would have been better suited as a novel, rather than the nonfiction it purports to be. Recommended.

Libertarians descend on the small New Hampshire town of Grafton to launch what they will call the “Free Town Project.” There is a hope that like-minded libertarians across the nation will come to help build this shining beacon of logic and reason. A city vehemently opposed to government overreach and taxes. There's a lot of room for interpretation and would extend beyond the God given right to bear arms, to trafficking in organs, holding bum fights, and accepting consensual cannibalism. While they pared down services to the bone, forgoing road repairs, capable fire stations, and even a drivable police car for the lone full-time officer, the city saw an increase in sex offenders, homicides, lawsuits and, as the title suggests, bear attacks.

Dunking on credulous firebrands intent on battling government overreach against their own self-interest and well-being is by now a wearying pastime. There's little humour to be had now that it's become such a pervasive part of our world. Charismatic ideologues proffering their vision of some ideal future state, positioning themselves as noble vanguards pushing against reigning norms has given us anti-vaxxers, QAnon, the manosphere, and Elon Musk. Chuckling along at their antics with an exasperated “oh you” and pandering to some imagined leftwing reader feels like the writing of an older, gentler time and lacks the teeth you'd want in this increasingly partisan world that demands blood - or at least a scathing hot take.

Wow this drags so badly! It feels like it should have been a long article precisely because every tangent drags and isn't meaningfully tied back together- in theory every nonfiction book of this style could be an article, but it's the breadth of stories and how they are interwoven that makes them book-worthy, not the repetitive fanfiction-y prose practice of just walking us again and again through a hypothetical emotional landscape of someone who does not matter to the matter at hand. At points I felt like I had forgotten what I was even supposed to be taking away.
Also, something about this felt really... ideologically strange, as in inconsistent. I feel some type of way about libertarians, sure, but I felt like Hongoltz-Hetling could not decide if he thought libertarians were idiots or not. Some of the concessions he gave during the longwinded explanations felt... just brazy that he let them slide without comment, and some got such overwrought takedowns it felt like a series of quote tweets on Twitter with a million likes. Just strange!

I... found myself rooting for the bears more often than not. The cast of characters are what you'd expect, and it was interesting to read of the experiences these folks have had with the growing bear population in their community.

That said, I found at times the story ran long. The book itself is broken into many many small chapters; while easy to read in bite-sized pieces it disrupts any kind of flow.

I suppose I'd had different expectations about the topic of the book. I expected it to be more about the workings of a libertarian town building up, and while it has that, the bears feature a lot more prominently overall.