Awards

• Winner of Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1995
• Winner of Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1995.

Overview

A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.

Full Product Details

9780006547150

Table of Contents

Reviews

An Englishwoman's amused yet sympathetic journey through the New Age culture of the American West. McGrath travels through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado on a kind of cynic's pilgrimage, to learn about New Age spirituality. On her journey she meets a wide cross-section of the walking wounded: people with remembered past lives, psychics, princesses from lost subterranean cities, damaged inner children, people working on themselves. Her account makes a fine contribution to the tradition of witty foreign commentary on US culture, and her approach to New Age spirituality - skeptical, with an eye for the hilarious and absurd - is thoroughly entertaining. Some of what she describes is devastating; in a chapter on the New Age appropriation of Native American culture, for instance, McGrath quotes one of her white seekers as saying that the Indians who are addicted to alcohol and gambling aren't really Indians: They're reincarnations of 19th-century white men, paying back bad karma.... Real Indians are spiritually pure. McGrath is a rare phenomenon: a European who can report on American racism and commercial excess without sounding self-righteous. It is not until the final chapter that we learn the extent of her own spiritual despair: that she has been depressed and suicidal throughout her adult life, looking for solace in various kinds of therapy and drugs. This section adds a self-reflectiveness and empathy to her story, making it clear that she identifies with people who are seeking meaning in their lives and that, in some ways, what brought her to the Southwest was not so far from what draws the New Agers. McGrath achieves a balance between mockery and understanding that is rare among commentators on contemporary spirituality. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Melanie McGrath was born near Romford, Essex. Her books include, Motel Nirvana, which won the 1996 John Llewelyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday award for the Best New British and Commonwealth Writer under thirty-five, Hard Soft and Wet, the bestselling memoir Silvertown and, most recently, The Long Exile: A True Story of Deception and Survival Amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Hopping, the sequel to Silvertown, will be published by Fourth Estate in early 2008. She writes for the Guardian, Independent, The Times, Evening Standard and Condé Nast Traveller. She is a regular broadcaster on radio, and has been a television producer and presenter. She lives and works in London.

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