Thank you, Netgalley and St Martin's Press for this advanced reader's copy. This was a was fascinating look at how we use and abuse our land. There were parts of this book I absolutely loved, the parts when the author spoke about housing and that all housing shouldn't be for profit. Housing should be a human right. I currently live in one of the most expensive cities in the US and there needs to be AFFORDABLE HOUSING created in ALL CITIES if they want to help with homeless and poverty. There are places with rent control, and they need to be maintained appropriately (and not just for the rich to hoard). I also loved the author's chapter on how Eisenhower providing protections to keep our national land free and wild can benefit the earth with climate change by not mining and building on ALL of our land, keeps beautiful rolling fields, and also benefits our country with tourism.

Based on the title FREE THE LAND: The Root Cause of Inequality and the Fight for a Better Future, I naively hoped Audrea Lim’s latest work would simplify the multiple problems of land ownership with its toxic social and environmental effects.
Instead, she lays bare an incredibly complex legal, political and social quagmire, a terrain in which no one solution fits all cases.

This is a challenging book to read, both because the issues and history Lim tries to assimilate into a full picture are so complex, but also because it is discouraging to see how often well-meaning solutions flounder at cross purposes.

America, writes Lim, “is synonymous with private property,” as is consistent with our core social value individualism. This relationship with the land goes way back historically and runs counter to indigenous belief systems. The challenge now is how to “decommodify” the land, delink it sufficiently from profit, to solve problems in the environment along with climate change and major social justice concerns.

The above comments are inadequate to address the book’s value or its difficulty. I often found myself barely holding on until the tedium of historical explanations would give way to some narrative anecdotes. Lim did deliver as she traveled to the site of many experiments, interviewed innovators and opponents, and provided personal insights. To understand complex subjects often requires processing complex information, and there’s no way around that.

As a general reader, I’m not in a position to referee any facts, but I frequently found her accounts eye-opening, as well as disturbing. But also, and this is the best part, I was often encouraged to see how many people are diligently searching for solutions, and achieving incremental success. And, as a further testament to the book’s worth, I was moved to look up several of the organizations Lim referenced and am trying to decide where to offer further support.

With thanks to St Martin’s Press and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.