Living Together: A Year in the Life of a City Commune

Living Together, 2013 Edition. Containing the original 1974 manuscript plus a new update and look back years later by the author In the summer of 1971, a small group of young, educated people (a journalist, an archaeologist, a doctor, a teacher, a medical student, a community organizer, a therapist, a microbiologist) decided to upend their middle class lives by joining together to live communally. Caught up in the political and cultural furor of their times, dissatisfied as so many of their contemporaries were with the contradictions between their political and social values and their daily lives, they decided to experiment with sharing their incomes, possessions, household chores and most importantly, some measure of themselves. Would the value of a shared life – a life intended to loosen the hold of consumer capitalism – compensate for the loss of privacy and some autonomy? The beauty of Living Together is its honesty. The first book by the author and journalist Mike Weiss, it renders the experience of living in Cliveden House with the eye and ear of a writer sensitive to the complexities and ambiguities of human feeling.