Synopses & Reviews
In
Cities on a Hill, Frnaces FitzGerald, one of our most gifted and acclaimed writers and social historians, explorers what it is to be an American. In this major new work, she reports on four communities she sought out cultural enclaves that took place during the sixties and seventies that serve to show what was happening in our larger society. FitzGerald brings together very different communities that, surprisingly at first glance, strongly reflect the visionary impulse she considers one of the nation's perennial traits. They are:
The Liberty Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose pastor, Jerry Falwell, is the founder of the Moral Majority and one of the most articulate leaders of the religious right. His "separatist" church provides its members with a way of living in American society (or "the world") without being part of it.
The Castro, in San Francisco, the first gay neighborhood in the country and, as such, something new under the sun. Its own activists thought of it as the cutting edge of a national movement of gay liberation. They wanted to overturn one of the oldest and strongest taboos in the culture, and, beyond that, to challenge the conventions surrounding the "traditional" nuclear family. Falwell's church illuminates the new fundamentalist movement and casts light on the conservative evangelical movement as a whole. The gay community in the Castro reflects the wider revolution in sex and gender roles.
A retirement town in Florida, Sun City, again something brand new and very American. Sun Citians too are evolving a distinct culture. Belonging to the first generation to reach old age en masse, in good health, and with independent resources, they chose to invent a community in order to create a conception of how their stages of life should be led. They are "pioneers on the frontiers of age."
Lastly, the Rajneeshee community in Oregon, founded by an Indian guru who took over a town and dressed everybody, including the copes, in shades of red. This New Age community seemed to be trying to roll all the California youth religions into one, practicing Zen, encounter, tantric sex, disco dancing and primal screaming. And as Falwell's church seemed to be moving into the world with its political message, so the Rajneeshee, largely middle-class professional people, seemed to be moving away from it to create a separatist community.
Each of these communities, Frances FitzGerald finds, regards itself as an exemplar of a new consciousness, or a new way of living, or both. Their members believe it is possible to shake off the past, to take up a new life without reference to the old one and at the same time to transform their society. This is a great deal of what it is to be an American. Four centuries after the Puritans arrived to build their City on a Hill, Americans are still self-consciously building cities on a hill.
Review
"The idea of starting fresh, building a new (restructured, better) life, not only individually, but communally with other like-minded souls, is, says Pulitzer Prize-winning author FitzGerald, probably quintessentially American....A very readable and thoughtful work, this is highly recommended...as a contribution to understanding our uniqueness as a nation." Library Journal
Review
"[An] impression one might receive from this fascinating book is of a spoiled society far gone in self-indulgence, beyond cooperation and simple community....Because [FitzGerald] is thoughtful, intelligent, detached, and learned, she is a reliable observer, and her method seems admirably adapted to the complex subject." New York Review of Books