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CITIES ON A HILL

By Frances FitzGerald

"We must consider that we shall be A City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us," John Winthrop told his Pilgrim community crossing the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Four centuries later, Americans are still building Cities Upon a Hill.
In Cities on a Hill Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald explores this often eccentric, sometimes prophetic inclination in America. With characteristic wit and insight she examines four radically different communities -- a fundamentalist church, a guru-inspired commune, a Sunbelt retirement city, and a gay activist community -- all embodying this visionary drive to shake the past and build anew.
Frances FitzGerald here gives eloquent voice and definition to a quintessentially American impulse. It is a resonant work of literary imagination and journalistic precision.
Photograph by Frances F. Denny
Frances FitzGerald

Frances FitzGerald is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and a prize from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam; America Revised: History School Books in the Twentieth Century; Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures; Way Out in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review An eloquent testament to the crazy vigor of this country, a book that persuades us that it's still the luckiest place to be whatever your stripe...An ambitious work...painstakingly thorough.

Publishers Weekly Brilliantly succeeds in getting inside the minds of these communities.

The Washington Post Absorbing...extremely thought-provoking, and great fun to read...I could hardly turn the pages fast enough.

The New York Times Ms. FitzGerald [has] the watchful eye of an anthropologist...writing with lucid sympathy for her subjects...A well-written, well-documented book.

CITIES ON A HILL

By Frances FitzGerald

More books from this author: Frances FitzGerald