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A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears.Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
Publication Year: 2020
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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.