Simple Gifts: Lessons in Living from a Shaker Village

In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America's last Shaker communities—Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New Hampshire—during its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable "survivor" women, who were among the last representatives of our longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of Shakers in America as she s...