Heaven Is a Place on Earth
Searching for an American Utopia
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Shirk (And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy) mixes autobiography and history in this enlightening study of utopian communities in America. Loosely defining utopias as "something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, was never supposed to be able to exist, but somehow did," Shirk documents her own efforts to reclaim her creative energy and build a communal life with friends and other writers and artists, and visits the sites of vanished utopian societies, including the furniture-building Shakers in Mount Lebanon, N.Y., as well as contemporary communes such as the Bruderhof in the Catskills, where members build and sell wooden toys. She notes that, despite differing belief systems, modern utopias often network with one another, offering labor and experience in order to help ensure their long-term survival. She also poses intriguing questions about the possibility of achieving true gender and racial equality within communes, which skew overwhelmingly white and often return women to traditional domestic roles, and reflects on how an intense period of caretaking for her ailing father-in-law placed a strain on her marriage and her finances and highlighted the inadequacies of "normal" society. Enriched by Shirk's trenchant observations and open-minded curiosity, this is a winning survey of the desire to make the world a better place.
