Provides a history of the United States from pre-Columbian Native American civilizations to the Clinton administration

Looking across three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, this work introduces a cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Scott and Helen Nearing, Jimmy Carter and Jane Addams. It finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. Though we may hedge a bit in practice and are now and then driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia, this work stresses that the diverse efforts to avoid anxious social striving and compulsive materialism have been essential to the nation's spiritual health.

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Product Description: In 1985, David Shi's The Simple Life received much critical acclaim and generated widespread popular interest. "The first history of the idea of the simple life in American," said Walter Harding in The thoreau Society Bulletin, "and an excellent one it is...read more

Product Description: Yale University Press, 1981, Very good., Clean, tight, in dust jacket. Light wear. 314 pages. [Biography, Matthew Josephson] Out-of-print and antiquarian booksellers since 1933. We pack and ship with care.