THIS IS BURNING MAN

A frequent attendee takes a look at the nation’s wildest anarchist arts festival.

After establishing that there’s no way to accurately describe the frenzied, weeklong bacchanal of Burning Man, Reason magazine associate editor Doherty takes the most conventional route to introduce readers to this nearly 20-year-old annual party. It takes place near Gerlach, Nevada, a site chiefly known for its astonishing emptiness. Before Burning Man came to town, the dry lakebed landscape was chiefly used to conduct automobile speed tests. Now, free spirits roll through once a year to camp out, build enormous art installations, stay up late and party, and then burn their work at the end of the week in celebration of anticommercialism. Unfortunately, this feeling of wild abandon is absent from Doherty’s text as he plods through Burning Man’s history, from its origins as a minor ritual for a few intellectual San Francisco carpenters to its current incarnation as an LLC. Beginning with the story of the festival’s founder, Larry Harvey, the author introduces the reader to the many outsized personalities and arts collectives that have joined through the years to make the festival what it is today. With such a large, revolving cast of founders and supporters, however, the reader is hard-pressed to keep the characters straight. The festival’s evolution from a casual party to a highly orchestrated event does provide for some interesting moments; the scheme to store tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of proceeds in Ziploc baggies in a giant underground hole seems quintessential. Still, despite Doherty's many attempts to convey the sense of community and wonder that so many participants (and he himself) express, the reader is left with a single general impression of artistically inclined social dropouts who like to play with flamethrowers.

Sinks under the weight of the author's sincerity.