Ahoy there mateys!  Though the First Mate and I have very different reading tastes, occasionally we do recommend books to each other.  He and I both read the following:

We read and talked about the book and I enjoyed his viewpoint so I ordered asked him to write a review.  So you get one from me and a bonus additional review from me crew.  Please note that I write like I talk and the First Mate writes like he thinks.  Hope you enjoy!

From the Captain:

If anyone asked me to provide a timeline of events or even a light plot summary of how the Libertarian movement worked in this book, I would be hard pressed to oblige.  This book was so scattered in the telling that I honestly ended up being confused about the book's overall message or even the consequences of the Free Town Project.  Well besides the "taxes are evil" theme and that the Project failed.  This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book.  I did.  I just enjoyed it for reasons that I don't believe were the stated purpose of the book.  And I don't think listening to it in audiobook form was the problem.

The book's premise as indicated to me from the blurb is that a small New Hampshire town is inadvertently taken over by Libertarians whose policies lead to too many bears (and other things) and thus chaos ensues.  But Grafton, said taken over town, seemed to be just fine having bear and tax problems on its own even before the Libertarians show up.  In fact, the author does a nice job providing small snippets of Grafton's history of hatred of both bears and taxes from the town's inception in 1778.

Like in many small towns (well, everywhere really) there are some truly colorful people.  Donut Lady, who purposely fed the bears, was one such person.  The attack llama was awesome.  The story of the woman who helped run the Moonies and later gets attacked by a bear was heart breaking and she had the only semi-happy ending in the whole book.  However, because of the crazy disorganization of the chapters, many of the white, gun-toting, government-hating men were rather interchangeable and I had trouble telling them apart.

The book does resonate in how not paying for public services ended up being problematic for Grafton.  The chapter about the lack of a paid fire department, a dearth of fire equipment, and the statics of Grafton fires was horrifying.  Ditto for discussions about roads or schools.  The comparisons to other nearby towns with basically similar tax rates but lots of public services was illuminating.  As a reader, the library statistics and stories were fascinating.

But I felt like what I got out of this book were interesting fragments about random historical events of New Hampshire in general, Grafton specifically, and bears during the history of the U.S.  Throw in some Libertarian politics and people.  But if the premise was to show how Libertarians almost ruined a town, the book spectacularly fails.  The residents of Grafton may not call themselves Libertarians but from a practical standpoint, I really don't see the difference.  Arrrr!

From the First Mate:

Like a lot of people, I heard about Hongoltz-Hetling’s book during the pre-publication media tour. My exposure was reading an excerpt that focused on the “Donut Lady” and her propensity to feed doughnuts to the bears outside of her New Hampshire home and the way in which the lax regulations of the town prevented anyone from stopping her. The implication of the excerpt and the book the excerpt was promoting appeared to be that the libertarians who’d moved into town had spearheaded a wave of deregulation that was destroying the town and threatening the lives of its citizens. To say that implication was misleading would be quite an understatement.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is kind of a mess of a book. A mix of colonial history, small town politics, fringe political philosophy, profiles of odd people, and baffled finger pointing, the book seems to struggle in attempting to make a point. Focusing mostly on Grafton, New Hampshire, we learn that the town has a long history of opposing taxes and regulations. There’s the story of the town briefly becoming part of Vermont in an effort to avoid paying taxes. There’s the story about not having a fire department well into the twentieth century (and then continually underfunding it). There’s the various schemes historical residents of the town used to avoid paying taxes. And all of that before the libertarians came to town.

Don’t get me wrong, the libertarians and their Free Town Project didn’t make Grafton any better, but Hongoltz-Hetling doesn’t really present any good arguments for their attempts to take over the town making it significantly worse, either. The libertarians appeared to choose Grafton because it was already somewhat amenable to libertarian ideals. The aforementioned Donut Lady is a local. As are many of the other Grafton residents who were profiled and who favored smaller government, deregulation, and not paying taxes.

Which brings us to the bears. We learn that it’s not just Grafton that has a bear problem. The entire state of New Hampshire is rife with bears. Some of that problem stems from the fact that New Hampshire is kind of libertarian in its general political outlook and doesn’t provide adequet resources to its bear problems. But mostly there’s a lot of bears in New Hampshire because there’s a lot of bears in all of New England. Some of the New England states put more resources towards dealing with the bears and those states tend to have less bear problems. But many of the fascinating historical accounts that we get in the book focus on the fact that bears have always been a problem in the area. I was particularly fond of the story of “Old Slippery Skin.”

Small, rural towns are weird. And they’re usually populated with weird people who have weird interests and get up to all sorts of weird behavior. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the story of a weird town that had some weird people move in and try to take over. The town’s problems existed before the attempted takeover and exist to this day. Perhaps the most puzzling part, given the desire of both the locals and the libertarians to not pay taxes, is the fact that Grafton pays taxes at around the same level as all of the surrounding towns.

I guess ultimately I don’t know what the point of the book was. The title and the media push would suggest that it’s a takedown of the failure of the Free Town Project. Hongoltz-Hetling seems to view the libertarians as villains here; and, honestly, they’re a disagreeable sort whom I found easy to dislike. But the book doesn’t make a successful argument that Grafton would’ve been fine if not for those silly fools who invaded. Seems like Grafton has spent over two hundred years trying to chew off its own leg.

Recommended to people who enjoy profiles of interesting people and colonial history. Avoid if lack of truth in advertising offends.