Above the Line

A funny, fierce, imaginative memoir chronicling New York Times bestselling author and Academy Award winner Shirley MacLaine&;s remarkable experiences filming Wild Oats in the Canary Islands and the extraordinary memories her time there brought forth of a past life on the lost continent of Atlantis.Her agent advised her not to get on the plane. The male leads weren&;t even cast. The financing was shaky at best. The script had been rewritten countless times. And yet something about Wild Oats lured Shirley MacLaine to the film&;s location shoot in the far-off Canary Islands&;and straight to the center of one of the most thrilling and paradigm-shifting adventures of her life. The making of the film reads like a screwball comedy, as the cast and crew face unpredictable daily obstacles with ingenuity, grit, and personal sacrifice. Yet the chaos leads Shirley to a revelatory new understanding of the demise of one of history&;s most elusive yet endlessly intriguing places. Scholars have long theorized that Spain&;s Canary Islands are the remnants of the mighty lost continent of Atlantis. As the movie set descends into pandemonium, Shirley finds fascinating corollaries between the island&;s cataclysmic fate and our own dangerous trajectory. Can we learn the lessons the citizens of Atlantis failed to comprehend? The answer is borne out of recovered memories from Shirley&;s past life on Atlantis and through a series of meditations that reveal the necessity of unfettered imagination when looking for bold new truths, rendering this evocative, irreverent, and honest memoir essential reading for anyone seeking a broader understanding of what it means to be human&;both where we came from and where we are going.