Much has been written about the experiences of young people who have "dropped out" and gone to the country to live off the land communally; relatively little has been written about a lifestyle which numerous people are trying out and which numerous others are considering or are simply curious about: the city commune. This is the story of a house in Philadelphia where Michael Weiss and his wife and their eight-year-old son lived with two other women and four other men, one of them gay--people from different backgrounds, with different professions (a journalist, an archaeologist, a doctor, a teacher, a medical student, an organizer for a radical health collective, a group therapist, a microbiologist), who acknowledged a mutual need for community and were willing to experiment in sharing incomes, possessions, household responsibilities, and, more important and much more difficult, some measure of themselves.It is a book that will tell readers what they really want to know about communal life--how people relate to each other in a situation. What are the rewards, the hassles, the tensions, the joys? What are the sexual undercurrents of such a way of life and can they be acknowledged and dealt with openly? Do the values of a life shared with others compensate for the loss of a private existence?The beauty of this book is its honesty. Michael Weiss speaks only for his own experience; he makes no attempt to proselytize--but he renders this experience with the eye and ear of a writer sensitive to the complexities and ambiguities of human feelings.