Heaven Is A Place On Earth: Searching For An American Utopia,New

An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under latestage capitalismTold in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experimentsfrom the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movementthrough 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 fatherinlaw has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husbandboth adjuncts in their midtwentiesbecome his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America's broken healthcare system and ordinary twentyfirstcentury 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 utopiamaking, 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 existbut does anyway, if only for a moment.