For a brief time in mid-nineteenth-century Oneida, New York, two of the most eccentric and fascinating figures in American history crossed paths when troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes's utopian community of 'free love' believers. In The Substance of Things Hoped For, Tom Noyes-a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes-renders this historical intersection by deftly imagining the dynamics and consequences of an ominous a...
