Review by Choice Review
Weber (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln) provides a balanced and insightful study that acknowledges the creativity and the crises associated with the arrival of an international spiritual movement in an Iowa town in the 1970s. Practitioners of transcendental meditation (TM) selected Fairfield, Iowa, to become a major center for alternative education and meditation practice. TM has been well documented as a new religious movement by scholars (e.g., Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America, CH, Jul'10, 47-6199), and widely promoted by its practitioners. Weber's study is unique in effectively interweaving the movement's ideology, institution building, philanthropy, involvement in local politics and government, and initiation and expulsion of followers into a sustained narrative that matches those found in the best American community studies. Weber's more than three decades as a practicing journalist, many of them at BusinessWeek, along with his university teaching experience, have made him a canny interviewer and skilled researcher. This book almost certainly will find a place among the long-enduring studies of North American communal, intentional, and utopian experiments. The author's account of the transformation of the long-established town of Fairfield and the inauguration of the newly incorporated Maharishi Vedic City is vivid and compelling. --Gene R. Thursby, University of Florida
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Weber (Businessweek) has written a scattered but fascinating and balanced account of the community in Fairfield, IA, that grew up around the presence and charisma of the famed and controversial Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008). He follows the story of this unusual group as it rises, and, in the wake of its founder's death, slowly declines despite the members' efforts to keep a university going and run for public office. -Weber looks frankly at both the joy Transcendental Meditation (TM) has brought to its members and the folly and debate that have surrounded it as well; he shrewdly compares its likely future to that of the nearby Amana community, a semi-separate group of utopian dreamers. -VERDICT An honest look at the very mixed success of TM in the Midwest, this book should be of keen interest to academics and general readers alike. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
