3 h 11 minAudiobook5 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 3 h 11 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when idealists try to share not just their beliefs, but their work, study and property?
In My Friends at Brook Farm, John Van der Zee Sears recalls an experimental community near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Led by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister and critic, its members seek a different way to live. Fields and barns belong to the same daily world as teaching, study and conversation.
Sears knows Brook Farm and its people from his younger days. His memoir brings affection to their attempt to turn ideas into ordinary life. As members embrace Charles Fourier’s vision of cooperative groups, the community changes direction and faces trouble. What remains is more than a story of failure: it is a personal memory of people trying to live their beliefs.
What you’ll discover
- A bold shared life Explore an experiment that brings work, learning and shared property into one community.
- People behind the ideals Meet George Ripley through the recollections of someone who knows the farm and its members.
- Fields, books and conversation Discover ordinary days shaped by farm labor, teaching, study and time spent talking.
- A community changes course Follow the turn toward Charles Fourier’s cooperative ideas and the troubles that follow.
- Memory with warmth See Brook Farm through affectionate recollections that refuse to reduce it to failure.
Who will love it
For readers who love American history, Transcendentalists, utopian experiments, and boyhood memoirs full of snowstorms, pageants, music, and lively companions, and for anyone curious how ideals look in daily life.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A Dutch Boyhood in Albany
- How Greeley Led to Brook Farm
- A Bad Beginning Becomes a Good One
- Work, School and the Habit of Attention
- Play, Pageants and Conversation
- Fourier, the Phalanx and the End
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Mes amis de Brook Farm
by John Van der Zee Sears · 1912
A Dutch boy from Albany learns to toboggan, milk cows and whistle a call at Brook Farm.
Challenging2–5 hours to readfrançais
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In short
Imagine a boy from a Dutch-speaking neighborhood in Albany, sent in winter to a farm school near Boston where grown people try to live by their ideals. My Friends at Brook Farm is John Van der Zee Sears's warm memoir of the 1840s community founded by the Reverend George Ripley.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A Dutch Boyhood in Albany
Sears begins in the Old Colony of Albany, where Dutch settlers arrived in 1624 and their descendants still kept Dutch speech and customs two centuries later. His father sold flour by the canal basin. His mother sang Dutch nursery rhymes to her children.
The boy spends happy days at his grandfather's farm, where two elderly Black servants, Tone and Cleo, treat him as the heir of the place. Sears tells this with candor. It is one of several moments where the memoir shows the odd mixtures of the age.
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Which edition is right for me
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 5 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- First published
- 1912
- Language
- français
- Reading time
- 2 h 5 min
- Level
- Challenging
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What is My Friends at Brook Farm about?
It is a memoir of a boyhood at Brook Farm, the 1840s community near Boston. John Van der Zee Sears recalls the school, the work, the entertainments, the famous visitors, and the final troubles that closed the experiment.
What was Brook Farm?
Brook Farm was a community of about two hundred acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, founded by the Unitarian minister George Ripley. Its members farmed, taught school and shared work and leisure. They later reorganized as a Fourierist Phalanx.
Who is Cedar in the book?
Cedar is the nickname the author earned at Brook Farm. It comes from the smell of the cedar chest his clothes were packed in, and his friends and classmates used it for him afterward.
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