Looming over Susan Wels’s “An Assassin in Utopia” are two men steered by their own contrarian compasses—John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida religious community and coiner of the term “free love,” and Charles Guiteau, onetime Oneidan and eventual assassin of President James Garfield. In this crowded volume, Ms. Wels, who has previously written books on the Titanic and Pearl Harbor, dips into the personal and social forces that drove both of these peculiar men. She also packs in a host of other 19th-century notables, including spiritualists, politicians, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley and professional huckster P.T. Barnum. A crammed curio-cabinet of a book, “An Assassin in Utopia” offers an engaging glimpse of the times.
