Excellent, informative, easy to follow and fun to read. Delicious results in cooking too!

I originally read this book as a library book in it's first edition. It was one of the seminal influences in my discovering France and discovering my own love of cooking and fine food. Over the years I acquired several other books by Roy Andries De Groot and he never failed to inspire me. This one is absolutely a classic for any one who loves food and travel.

One of the other reviewers noted DeGroot's gift for description, and was amazed when he learned that deGroot was blind. I, who knew he was blind before I read the book, was also amazed and continue to be -- though there are telltale clues throughout, as, for example, when he describes eau de vie de prune as deep purple in color. Not in his lifetime or mine: it is clear as water...it simply tastes dark purple. But no matter about DeGroot's blindness or occasional factual slips; this is one of the greatest (and oddest) cookbooks in English, one of the very few to sit comfortably on a shelf with the works of Madelaine Kamman, Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, and MFK Fisher. Like the best works of those other authors, this is fundamentally a book about life-well-lived, not merely about cooking, eating and drinking. Nonetheless, the recipes work well and the stories behind them provide more than enough context and inspiration to pursuade you to try them. The oddness comes from the fairy-tale atmosphere DeGroot creates and maintains throughout. The mysterious old inn (no longer extant, of course) in the village at the top of the alpine valley could almost have come from the Brothers Grimm -- except there are no evil witches, just two kindly and aging lesbians, and the cauldron in the kitchen is not bubbling over with unspeakables. I have been cooking seriously for thirty years, have taught cooking in Parisand other places, and have been the executive chef of a Michelin rated restaurant in London (I'm now a lawyer and business consultant in California). In my restaurant in London (6 Clarendon Road, W11, now run by my friend and grand gourmand, Paul Fisher) I gave a copy to all the senior cooks, and insisted that they read it -- not for the recipes specifically, but for the wonderment, dedication and attention to detail I felt sure it would inspire. It did. Truly, a not-to-missed book.

If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to that Auberge! The way he describes his first steps into the hidden valley, sound like the opening to The Sound of Music ... I read this book with growing love and fascination, then went to study cooking at the French Culinary Institute and discovered that he is right about the food, the history. I haven't tried these specific recipes yet, though they sound like French classics. Thank you, thank you, for telling this story.

Imagine a world where you got to choose what you did every day (as long as your four daily labor-credits are completed), where, as everyone is equal to everyone else, the words 'thank-you' are never used and where education, which is never forced, is something your kids just WANT to do. Is this better living through operant conditioning?

This fictional community is the brain-child of the famous (and imfamous) behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. Skinner believed that all behavior can be controlled by modification and 'positive reinforcement.' Well, here it is. A Skinnerian utopia.

The book itself has no real plot to speak of. The central characters,a group of 2 university professors, 2 twenty-somethings fresh from army service, and their two girlfriends that have been invited to take a tour of the Walden Two community. The book (narrated by one of the professors) is the fictional account of the tour which gets extraordinarily specific. The communes education, commerce, child-rearing, and governing practices are well-examined and this book, whether you agree with good ol' B.F. or not, will have you constantly thinking from new angles. If you're anything like me (frightening thought!) you might find yourself actually talking back to the book. What a rare experience!

The four stars are for both the writing- Skinner does much better than most psychologists crossing over to fiction- and for the wealth of ideas which are sharp, challenging and scary. Although in the end, I disagree with just about every idea Skinner remonstrates, this is a book that I'm sure I will reread and ponder over quite often.

I decided to reread this book not too long ago because I could remember little from my initial reading. I discovered many new nuances in the text that I picked up on immediately and had much fun with myself debating its many philosophical points. I would recommend this book to anyone, from the intellectual to the beginning reader, to the communist, to the libertarian.

For a book with no discernable plot, it comes across very well as a fun read. The book is merely the story of the narrator (Burris) writing a book about Walden Two. Unlike 1984 with its dramatic, albeit melodramatic, story line, Walden Two is simply a first-person narrative of a party's foray into Walden Two. However, Skinner rarely allows one to see this by assailing the reader with a barrage of his thoughts, opinions and findings.

There are, however, some shortcomings of this work, which warrant a one-star deduction. Skinner paints a wonderful Utopia and accounts for more of the minor details than most Utopia-oriented authors, but he makes a few glaring assumptions. Three come to mind as being the most detrimental to his argument. One) He assumes that Walden Two will magically produce enough goods to sustain itself with ample to spare for trade. Two) He assumes that a science of Behavioral Engineering is possible and implementable. And three) He assumes that this Behavioral Engineering will magically keep the Planners and Managers, the government of the community, from lusting after power, and that in this non-competitive-by-admission environment, people will still manage to excell past the norm. He attempts to support them, but he failed to convince me, no matter how I looked at the problem. Also, he is blatantly sympathetic to Russian Communism, although it was 1948 when he published the book, and Burris is so obviously a straw man concocted for Frazier to fight and convert that the last few chapters are almost laughable, if very poetic and well-written.

All in all, I give the book and Skinner's tactics of argument four stars, but Walden Two as a community, one. Although it seems tempting with four hour work days and no competition, Walden Two seems, at least on paper, as believable as Lilliput or Fantasia, or any other fanciful land.

Maybe Skinner should have made Walden Two a floating island and Frazier a green skinned dwarf, or something.......

Walden Two is an excellent portrayal of a working utopian society contrasted with the relatively gloomy style of life as we know it. A Brave New World and 1984 portray attempted utopian societies which fail or appear to be failing, but Walden Two works, according to its author. All throughout this novel, readers wonder if they would really like to live in a society like this by weighing the costs and benefits. Written in more of a philosophical type of dialogue between the protaganists and the antagonists, the novel at first presents to be dull, but persistence proves to be worthwhile. This is a must read for any student or professor, as it is for anyone interested in the psychology or philosophy of the book. Try to make your decision to live in the society before the last few chapters and debate it with your friends! Good luck!