Greetings from Utopia Park

May 1, 2016

With unflinching candidness, journalist Hoffman provides an examination of growing up within the transcendental meditation movement of the 1980s and 1990s. After being abandoned by her alcoholic husband, Hoffman's mother desperately decided to raise her small children away from the stress of urban life. Familiar with transcendental meditation, she relocated from New York to the group's self-proclaimed compound of "Heaven on Earth" in Fairfield, IA. Initially, the housing, schools, and seemingly boundless opportunities for growth through contemplation felt welcoming. However, promises of enlightenment and material comfort always seemed just out of reach to young Hoffman and her brother. As they matured into adolescence, these siblings were drawn to life outside the compound and forbidden temptations such as drugs and alcohol. The author recounts the break she made from Iowa as a teenager and her eventual life in California. Many recent memoirs, including Joshua Safran's Free Spirit: Growing Up on the Road and Off the Grid, have provided insight into unconventional childhoods. VERDICT With honesty and sincerity, this account of coming of age within the ostensible confines of an alternative lifestyle delivers valuable knowledge of another phenomenon of cultural divergence.--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA

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April 15, 2016
Searching for bliss in America's heartland.In her candid debut memoir, journalist Hoffman, a former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, recalls her childhood in Fairfield, Iowa, in the 1980s and '90s, on a 272-acre campus established by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to promote Transcendental Meditation, spiritual enlightenment, and world peace. "The Movement I had grown up in," writes the author, "call it a cult, a religion, a community, it was all these--had rescued my family from a scary time." Her alcoholic father had abandoned his family; her mother, left with Claire and her brother, was destitute. Swept up in the TM movement, which was notorious for its celebrity followers (the Beatles, Mia Farrow), Hoffman's mother saw in Iowa the promise of utopia. "We are talking of a new civilization," Maharishi claimed. "No one will remain stressed, no one will remain hectic, everyone will fulfill one's wants." At first, Hoffman went to the local public school because her mother could not afford the pricey Maharishi School, but when an anonymous donor paid her tuition, she joined the school, where the curriculum focused on bliss. "Everyone wanted to be experiencing and emanating bliss"; everyone followed the Maharishi's directions to become enlightened, which meant meditating twice a day and following his dictates for "the way you ate, slept, built your home, wore your jewels, and looked to the stars." As she grew up, Hoffman became increasingly suspicious of the Maharishi's grand plan. First, she noticed "a tangible shift...from mantras to products" that the Maharishi trademarked. Maintaining that "Americans only value things if they have to pay for them," he increased the school's tuition and charged thousands of dollars for his coveted Flying Course in levitation. The author was also suspicious about his claim that the fall of the Berlin Wall had resulted from the power of meditation. A cleareyed critique that generously accounts for humanity's "profoundly sincere and motivated" quest for happiness and peace.

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May 1, 2016
That the grandly titled Utopia Park was, in fact, a trailer park distills so much of this perceptive look at a practice (or philosophy? or religion? or cult?) that is, by its nature, hazy. Hoffman was only five when her single mother moved her and her brother to Fairfield, Iowa, which the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (yes, the same one who advised the Beatles) had christened to his followers as the Global Headquarters of World Peace. As Hoffman grows up, her seemingly misplaced community of transcendental meditators follow their leader's increasingly arcane edicts to live 200% of life, become Enlightened, and spiritually regenerate the world all while he ramped up the prices. Money woes force the teenage Hoffman to leave the new-agey academy for the townie public school where, almost in the fashion of Amish Rumspringa, she swills beer, does drugs, gets cynical, and begins to distance herself with support from a recently returned alcoholic father. For a look at a global, if dubious, movement, this is wonderfully intimate: a cautionary tale that develops into one of inspiring self-determination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)