William Powers is author of Dispatches from the Sweet Life: One Family, Five Acres, and a Community’s Quest to Reinvent the World. It’s the third book in a trilogy of memoirs about choosing to simplify and connect with living beings rather than material possessions. In the first, Twelve by Twelve, he writes about living in a small cabin off the grid; in the second, New Slow City, he and his wife downsize to a tiny apartment in New York City. In the new book the family, with their infant daughter, move to a small town in Bolivia and seek to reclaim five acres of land damaged by industrial agriculture, and to find a balanced way of living and raising children, challenging American assumptions about progress, ambition, and the natural world.