the 1960s and 1970s, Americans Inbegan to question their country's image as the material paradise, "the land of opportunity." That questioning led to the founding of communes and other experimental societies. It also prompted some adventurers to escape the stifling, success-oriented climate of American city life to recover those Thoreauan values of self-reliance and resourcefulness in still untouched regions of the world. The hero of The Mosquito Coast is just such a frustrated fellow, who uproots his family from the security of their Massachusetts home and drags them to the Honduran jungle to help him build his own brave new world. Even though the family at first functions smoothly as a unit, the reader soon realizes that Father's missionary spirit has its darker side. In fact, his scorn for the natives' habits, especially their lack of industry in helping him to build an ice-making factory, begins...