Greetings from Utopia Park
Surviving a Transcendent Childhood
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Narrated by:
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Andi Arndt
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By:
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Claire Hoffman
About this listen
In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and '90s - a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers.
When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven - Iowa - to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Meditation - the Maharishi's method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life - was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.
At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi's philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning.
But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood.
Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.
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For the first 13 years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be 13 years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her.
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A truly unique background and story
- By Asaph on 04-13-18
By: Flor Edwards
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The Great Spring
- Writing, Zen, and This ZigZag Life
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.
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An enjoyable insight
- By Leigh A on 05-22-23
By: Natalie Goldberg
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The UnAmericans
- Stories
- By: Molly Antopol
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Again and again, Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.
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Sensational stories! Brilliant new author.
- By MidwestGeek on 05-04-14
By: Molly Antopol
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Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter
- By: Melissa Francis
- Narrated by: Cris Dukehart
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world’s most famous prime-time soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother.
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Awesome book - really enjoyed it.
- By Jane C. Bailey on 11-16-12
By: Melissa Francis
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The Longest Trip Home
- By: John Grogan
- Narrated by: John Grogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the highly anticipated follow-up to Marley & Me, John Grogan again works his magic, bringing us the story of what came first. Before there was Marley, there was a gleefully mischievous boy growing up in a devout Catholic home outside Detroit in the 1960s and '70s. Despite his loving parents' best efforts, John's attempts to meet their expectations failed spectacularly.
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As real as it gets
- By bclmb on 12-06-08
By: John Grogan
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Agorafabulous!
- Dispatches From My Bedroom
- By: Sara Benincasa
- Narrated by: Sara Benincasa
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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One of the funniest and most poignant books ever written about a mental illness, Agorafabulous! is a hilarious, raw, and unforgettable account of how a terrified young woman, literally trapped by her own imagination, evolved into a (relatively) high-functioning professional smartass. Down to earth and seriously funny, Benincasa's no-holds-barred revelations offer listeners the politically incorrect hilarity they heartily crave, yet is so often missing from your typical, weepy, and redemptive personal memoir.
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More Fun than a Good Cry in a Bathroom Stall
- By Susie on 03-05-15
By: Sara Benincasa
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Disgruntled
- By: Asali Solomon
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenya Curtis is only eight years old, but she knows that she's different, even if she can't put her finger on how or why. It's not because she's black - most of the other students in the fourth-grade class at her West Philadelphia elementary school are, too. Maybe it's because she calls her father - a housepainter-slash-philosopher - "Baba" or because her parents' friends gather to pour out libations "from the Creator, for the Martyrs" and discuss "the community".
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Loved It!!!
- By ayodele higgs on 05-20-15
By: Asali Solomon
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Nearly Normal
- Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
- By: Cea Sunrise Person
- Narrated by: Cea Sunrise Person
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
- By Pamela Plimpton on 03-15-19
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Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin
- A Memoir
- By: Nicole Hardy
- Narrated by: Nicole Hardy
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.
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This Book Spoke to Me
- By Allison on 04-08-14
By: Nicole Hardy
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Chanel Bonfire
- By: Wendy Lawless
- Narrated by: Wendy Lawless
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time Wendy Lawless turned 17, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.... Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
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Not an Engaging Listen
- By Sobriquet on 03-13-13
By: Wendy Lawless
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After the Eclipse
- A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her ultimate mission to know the woman who gave her life.
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True crime memoir
- By Julie on 11-03-17
By: Sarah Perry
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Everything You Ever Wanted
- A Memoir
- By: Jillian Lauren
- Narrated by: Jillian Lauren
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.
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Great for adoptive families
- By berry bomb on 07-06-22
By: Jillian Lauren
What listeners say about Greetings from Utopia Park
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- doug
- 06-15-16
Loved it.
Great book, well read, interesting topic, Talked to a TM instructor last year, but it was over a 1000 dollars. So I like the topic, makes me think of the tunnel we all look through. Fun.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Daron Larson
- 08-26-16
It takes a village, with or without a guru
This is my favorite kind of memoir. The ones that feel like getting to know a new friend, with frequent shocks of recognition, and plenty of memories from my own life bubbling up to the surface.
It's a story about being raised in a community based on the teachings of a spiritual guru, but the dynamics will be familiar to anyone who has been immersed in a fundamentalist worldview. Instead of mocking the true believers from her childhood, Claire Hoffman allows us to see the absurdity of their loyalty and deference without losing sight of their humanity. It's written with respect, restraint, and tenderness.
In large part, it feels like an adult child's love letter to her mother. There is something so universal and relatable about doing the best we can as parents. Every decision her mother makes along the way is fueled by hope for a better life — even a better world. She's a devoted, earnest, and warm character who can't afford not to believe. I was on her side throughout. And being equally on Claire's side never felt like a contradiction. It revealed the complexity of parenting, growing up, and individuation.
There's not a shred of naïveté in this memoir, but there's not any bitterness either. This can't be by accident. What a gift it is to get glimpses of someone losing her faith in unquestioned authority and absolute answers growing to embrace the messiness of real life with enthusiasm, humility, and kindness.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Olivia Catherine
- 04-15-23
A delight to listen to for a TM Meditator.
Fairfield Iowa has always remained such a mystery to me! As a meditator I hear about it all the time but I always tried to imagine what living there must be like. Listening to, Greetings from Utopia Park was so much fun, I looked forward to a new chapter every night. Very thankful that Claire Hoffman wrote this very honest retelling of her childhood.
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- Ken Beller
- 06-20-16
Heartwarming, Captivating, and Real...A Great Book
Whether you know a little or a lot about the TM movement, you will enjoy this story. Realty that reads like brilliant fiction with deep meaning about life and all it's unexpected, but fascinating twists and turns. The writing is wonderful as is the narration.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-15-16
Very good book
This is the book Aaron Paul's character from "The Path" on Hulu would write if he were a journalist. The author does a really great job describing her dichotomous feelings of belief and disbelief. It's what many of us probably feel but are afraid to admit when it comes to our purpose and faith. Overall, it was a great listen and definitely captured my attention so much so that I was able to compete it in a day.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jackie Rosenfeld
- 12-30-16
Great book!
I listened to this book after hearing an interview with the author on the 10% Happier podcast. Beautifully written and wonderfully narrated. Arndt captures the essence of the narrative and all of its wonder and confusion. I couldn't stop listening until I finished.
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- Brandon Foley
- 08-23-18
Excellent.
I couldn’t stop listening. Maybe it’s because I’m an Iowan. Maybe because I’m a TM’er. Maybe because I’m the child of drug addicts. But this book engaged me in a way that a book hasn’t for a long time. Highly recommend it.
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- Ruth R-Evans
- 04-12-22
Whewww So Much to Think About
As a meditater within TM Community in Fairfield & a devote meditating husband I found this frustrating, familiar, irritating and True of Much of my TM experience. The experiences of C.Hoffman's thoughts, actions, child wonderings...All feelings I know & have. Many of the weird things(like Golden Crowns & BIG $$) are the very thing which helps me remember Marharshi was a man .... NOT GOD but a man who changed lives in many ways!!
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- tigerb
- 04-13-22
remarkable story, exceptional read
loved it!
couldn't put it down, interesting to glimpse inside the world of the transcendental meditation boom.
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- bobm
- 12-24-16
insightful
an honest view into the TM movement that is great but sometimes feels schizophrenic
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1 person found this helpful