Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World eBook: Ehrenreich, Barbara: Kindle Store

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Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition


4.4 out of 5 stars 103 ratings





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Print length

260 pages
Language

English
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Granta Books
Publication date

August 5, 2010













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Editorial Reviews

Review
This brilliant new book from the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch explores the tyranny of positive thinking, and offers a history of how it came to be the dominant mode in the USA. Ehrenreich conceived of the book when she became ill with breast cancer, and found herself surrounded by pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and platitudes. She balked at the way her anger and sadness about having the disease were seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other sufferers. In her droll and incisive analysis of the cult of cheerfulness, Ehrenreich also ranges across contemporary religion, business and the economy, arguing, for example, that undue optimism and a fear of giving bad news sowed the seeds for the current banking crisis. She argues passionately that the insistence on being cheerful actually leads to a lonely focus inwards, a blaming of oneself for any misfortunes, and thus to political apathy. Rigorous, insightful and bracing as always, and also incredibly funny, "Happy Face" uncovers the dark side of the 'have a nice day' nation.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003DX0HWC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books (August 5, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 5, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 699 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 260 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #1,459,045 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
#1,090 in Journalism Writing Reference (Kindle Store)
#2,925 in Popular Culture
#4,082 in Journalism Writing Reference (Books)
Customer Reviews:
4.4 out of 5 stars 103 ratings





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Biography
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia, USA.






JeanneAH
4.0 out of 5 stars Barbara Ehrenreich Book ReviewReviewed in the United States on May 16, 2012
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I have been an admirer of Barbara E. for a long time. She's a good writer and makes interesting things even more interesting. The book mainly deals with how the corporate, business, medical and religious worlds demand a "positive" attitude.. or else! Entertaining read. The only thing I was disappointed with was that this book had previously been released under another title .. "Bright Sided" and so I bought a book I had already read. I did like the book a lot, so I read it again. I do think it is a little sneaky for publishers...and Amazon.. to pull this trick.. and if they do they ought to advise the buyer about it.

39 people found this helpful

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Just reading
5.0 out of 5 stars A fine perspective on a cognitive sinkholeReviewed in the United States on January 9, 2013
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Clearly a cut above. Ehrenreich continually entertains and educates her readers in this description of the dangers of magical thinking and unfounded optimism. The author, whose tone could best be described as constructively pessimistic, gives ample background and lets the proponents of positive thinking speak their piece (thereby giving them just enough rope...). Do not miss it.

7 people found this helpful

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Sam Giancana
3.0 out of 5 stars Frown and prosperReviewed in the United States on January 24, 2014
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Entertaining, well written and a sympathetic thesis. This is a great book for those wondering why they can't just grit their teeth and fake happiness. I am interested in this authors other works now.

9 people found this helpful

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poohbear
5.0 out of 5 stars I really enjoyed it.Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2018
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As advertised.
I really enjoyed it...in a depressing way.


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Ironmonger
5.0 out of 5 stars a necessary readReviewed in the United States on November 20, 2019
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A must read for everyone convinced that this positivity movement isn't what its cracked up to be....
eyeopening and relevant


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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Good!Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2019
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good!


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humorous
5.0 out of 5 stars An Honest BookReviewed in the United States on August 21, 2012
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I was ( and still am ) lucky to have encountered the title of this book through the Internet, and luckiest to have bought this book and have read it from cover to cover, even though I am a naivete and did not have much knowledge about the author. With her renowned talent and with the honest feeling she had from the beginning when she started thinking about writing a book about being "positive", nothing could go wrong. I was touched, toward the end of this best-seller, when I read, to quote, "This is the project of science: to pool the rigorous observations of many people into a tentative accounting of the world, which will of course always be subject to revisions arising from fresh obserbations." Our life, including( sad to say ) what she wrote, is ephemeral, and she knows it.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Four StarsReviewed in the United States on March 7, 2016
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Very good


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Robin Richards
4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed reading 'Smile or Die' very much and I liked ...Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2018
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You could call it my guilty secret (ok one of my many guilty secrets) but I have something of a weakness for self-help books and what could be described as the 'Success' and positivity movement so I was interest to read the views of someone who challenges it. I enjoyed reading 'Smile or Die' very much and I liked the alternative views Barbara Ehrenreich presented especially her broad view of how management strategies use this overtly positive approach to attempt to offset the negatives of wholesale redundancies and also how an overtly positive, head in the sand, attitude impacted on the 2008 financial crisis. It was also helpful to read someone who challenges to 'Law of Attraction' - I must admit I've struggled with that one, and also her critique of the book 'Who Moved My Cheese' which I'd read, didn't find stimulating or insightful and was wondering if I'd missed something. Overall a useful book, I still err towards a having (and indeed encouraging others to have) a positive perspective but Barbara presents a sound counter argument which deserves consideration.

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Dirk vom Lehn
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent critical discussion of positive thinkingReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2016
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Ehrenreich systematically discusses the 'happiness movement' and its development from the Protestant Ethic. She shows how this movement underpins on the one hand the self-help movement on the other hand arguments by the rich and by corporation for people who are poor and/or unemployed to pull themselves up by thinking positively. This argument to change people's living and working conditions by turning inward rather than by changing the circumstances in which we all live is at the heart of Ehrenreich's critique. Highly recommended book.

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Mike Partner
5.0 out of 5 stars As it happens I was just about to write an article about the way that positive psychology turns the concept of happiness into aReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2015
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This is a book about a very serious subject that is written in an elegant and attractive style. As it happens I was just about to write an article about the way that positive psychology turns the concept of happiness into a right, duty and consumable commodity when I came across this book. It is very refreshing and introduces us to some of the characters in the happiness business in a witty, honest and engaging way, whilst making a strong argument for a change towards"vigilant realism" or even "defensive pessimism". This seems to me to address the whole capitalist preoccupation with consumption and how it has become a virus in our experience of ourselves. I urge you to read this book!

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Conall Boyle
4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful bookReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2010
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Very interesting story of the origins of 'positive thinking' backed up with fine research sources. An eye-opener, and one of those books that gets you to see things from a new angle.
From the early beginnings with christain science countering victorian miserable-ism through to pseudo-science of think yourself happy and cure your cancer, the author weaves a thread. The happy worker reconciled to his/her lousy job provides a horrifying glimpse into the corporate world.
The last bit on happiness theory from economists etc. I would judge less good. Ok so some of the well-known academics in the field are not above cashing in on their knowledge, and pandering to the happiness gurus. But the search for the good life goes on, regardless. Maybe if they seek ways to be happIER they might have a better handle on this.
Overall, I'd say a very good read, very insightful.

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Geoff60
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting slant on positive thinking modelsReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2019
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I came across this book from a reference in another book. Although it took a bit of time to get 'stuck-in' so to speak it was quite a revealing insight to the the US model of positive thinking throughout the last few decades. Definitely worth a read.
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DANCING IN THE STREETS A History of Collective Joy: Ehrenreich, Barbara: 9781862079540: Amazon.com: Books

DANCING IN THE STREETS A History of Collective Joy: Ehrenreich, Barbara: 9781862079540: Amazon.com: Books

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From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian, a fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy

In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion."

 Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. 

The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Progressive, Harper's, and Time magazine and currently lives in Florida.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Ehrenreich's social history of collective joy, ranging from pagan ritual to rock concerts, comes off as an extended, rambling lecture, taking in a varied array of subjects along the way. Taking the hint, Ward reads Ehrenreich's book with a touch of the lecturer's oratorical savvy, and some of that same figure's dry deliberation. Ehrenreich argues that communal ecstasy has been too often misunderstood as an excuse for booze-fueled sexual bacchanalias, ignoring its political and social components. Ward is neither overly joyous in her reading, owing too much to the nature of her material, nor overly serious, her voice tinged with the slightest hint of charmed pleasure at the prospect of declaiming on Ehrenreich's chosen subject. The unabridged audio is not overlong as audiobooks go, but there are moments where Ward's reading drags ever so slightly, pulled down by a sameness of approach that threatens to inspire the opposite of the ecstatic moments Ehrenreich's book describes. The solid quality of Ehrenreich's prose papers over the gaps and gives Ward's reading the pleasurable (if not quite monumentally joyous) sensation it possesses.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books; First Edition (January 1, 2007)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars

Top review from the United States

Tim Warneka

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, Well Researched

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2009

I listened to the audio version of this book.

I found this book to be fascinating and stimulating. As a life-long Roman Catholic, I thought the earlier reviews that decry the author for her 'church bashing' and 'Stalin'-like approaches were rather unfair and unnecessarily ad hominem. The author clearly put a great deal of time and effort into this book (either that, or she has an amazing team of researchers working for her! ;-D). It was fascinating for me to listen as she wove disparate pieces of information into a beautiful tapestry about the history of collective ecstatic dance in the Western world. (These kinds of books are very difficult to write. If you haven't tried to write a book such as this, I would strongly invite you to do so ... you'll gain a new appreciation for authors such as Ehrenreich who make it look so easy.)

I picked this book up because I very appreciated the author's  Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America  and  Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream . I appreciate the author because she is focusing on issues that, in my opinion, should deeply concern today's Christians, such as the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

As a mental health professional, I also found her discussion on depression and mental health issues to be very insightful.

The person who read the audio book did a wonderful job. I found her voice very easy to listen to. The only critique I would offer to the publisher is that I sometimes found it difficult to tell where a particular quote ended and where the text resumed (in several cases knowing where they quote ended made a significant different in understanding the text).

For people interested in historical Christianity, collective healing rituals, mental health, dance, martial arts, and other forms of physical movement, I would highly recommend this book.

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19 people found this helpful

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katherine stimson

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful well researched book that tells the alternative side of western dance history.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2020

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I ordered this book several years ago to supplement that texts that I give students to read in a Dance History class for professional level contemporary dance students. It never fails to be a big hit in the way that it is written and in the sentiment behind the roots of our collective dance and music traditions. Engaging and surprising this well researched book is an easy and enlightening read.

 

Wellman

5.0 out of 5 stars Clever author

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 13, 2020

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I like her pragmatism

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Ms. L. Gordon

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that articulates uncertainties about Western Society from a left field approach

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 22, 2014

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This is a book that articulated every unspoken and nebulous uncertainty I held about modern western society and supported my belief that we must fight for the right to dance in the streets...in every possible abstraction of the concept!

2 people found this helpful

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TAMicheli

5.0 out of 5 stars A singular joy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 13, 2015

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Both the scope and depth of this book strongly recommends it to all who study certain kinds of festivals and events. The book is a singular joy.

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ROMA

Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control - Kindle edition by Ehrenreich, Barbara. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control - Kindle edition by Ehrenreich, Barbara. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.




Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition


4.0 out of 5 stars 428 ratings

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Editorial Reviews

Review
"Ehrenreich's sharp and fearless take on mortality privileges joy over juice fasts and argues that, regardless of how many hours we spend in the gym, death wins out. An incisive, clear-eyed polemic, NATURAL CAUSESrelaxes into the realization that the grim reaper is considerably less grim than a life spent in terror of a fate that awaits us all."
―p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #454545}Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted

"...[A] provocative, informative, hilarious, and deeply moving book. A must read."―Arlie Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

"Throughout the text, [Ehrenreich] employs the erudition that earned her degree, the social consciousness that has long informed her writing, and the compassion that endears her to her many fans...A powerful text that floods the mind with illumination-and with agonizing questions."―Kirkus (starred review)

"[Ehrenreich] offers a healthy dose of reformist philosophy combined with her trademark investigative journalism. In assessing our quest for a longer, healthier life, Ehrenreich provides a contemplative vision of an active, engaged health care that goes far beyond the physical restraints of the body and into the realm of metaphysical possibilities."―Booklist

"Barbara Ehrenreich is a singular voice of sanity amid our national obsession with wellness and longevity. She is deeply well-informed about contemporary medical practices and their shortcomings, but she wears her learning lightly. NATURAL CAUSES is a delightful as well as an enlightening read. No one who cares about living (or dying) well can afford to miss it."―Jackson Lears, PhD, Editor in Chief of the Raritan Quarterly Review

"This book is joyous. It is neither anti-medicine nor anti-prevention; it is pro-balance, pro-scepticism and pro-perspective. Paradoxically, Natural Causes is about hope. If you are struggling with choices that weigh hope in potential medical advances that damage quality of life against non-treatment and the acceptance of a terminal diagnosis, this may not offer much comfort, but...as with so many of Ehrenreich's books, NATURAL CAUSES is a much-needed tonic."―The Guardian

"'Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth,' promised Archimedes. In Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has achieved an Archimedean feat. Her lever is made of erudition, acuity and irreverence; her place to stand is the perspective of cultural criticism; and she has turned the current understanding of body and self upon its head. To read this book is a relief: at last, what needed to be said!"―Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tickp.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 27.0px; font: 21.0px Arial; color: #111111; -webkit-text-stroke: #111111; background-color: #ffffff}span.s1 {font-kerning: none}

Claiming to be 'old enough to die,' feminist scholar Ehrenreich (Living with a Wild God) takes on the task of investigating America's peculiar approach to aging, health, and wellness...Ehrenreich's sharp intelligence and graceful prose make this book largely pleasurable reading."―Publishers Weekly

"...[R]ichly layered with evidence, stories and quotations...and sprinkled with barbed humor. Ehrenreich lets nobody off the hook, skewering Silicon Valley meditators and misogynist obstetricians with equal vigor. It's impossible to read this book without questioning the popular wisdom about the body and its upkeep. At the very least, you'll be able to make better decisions about how to work out, whether to have that mammogram and when to just order the steak."―BookPage

"[Ehrenreich's] description of cells rushing to staunch a wound is so full of wonder and delight that it recalls Italo Calvino...She sits in contemplation of death itself in the book's concluding, very beautiful passages, bringing to it her characteristic curiosity and awe at the natural world."―The New York Times

"Ehrenreich proves a fascinating guide to the science suggesting that our cells, like the macrophages that sometimes destroy and sometimes defend, can act unpredictably and yet not randomly."―The Atlantic

"[Ehrenreich] is one of our great iconoclasts, lucid, thought-provoking and instructive, never more so than here."―Blake Morrison, The Guardian

"Informative, provocative and entertaining."―The Times

"'Wham bam, thank you, ma'am' might be one response to this polemical, wry, hilarious and affecting series of counterintuitive essays by one of the most original and unexpected thinkers around...This is a book itself teeming with ideas and possibilities: maddening, stimulating, exciting and surprising, testifying in its own way to the expanding prospects of ideas that turn topsy-turvy, every-which-way as we try to make sense of the great unknowns."―The Arts Desk

"Ehrenreich's observations about our culture-wide denial of bodily decay lead[s]...down distinct paths of interrogation and discovery. For all [her] research, [she is] not prepared to give us easy answers. Still...dry humor and raw, personal accounts help make thinking about our common fate bearable. We may have a few extra years yet to sip kale smoothies, run marathons and get tested for everything under the sun, but we ought not make physical health our ultimate hope."―Wall Street Journal

"Engaging...Ehrenreich's scathing takedown of the wellness industry, New Age banalities and the epidemic of overdiagnosis will have you reconsidering how you live and die, and possibly second-guessing your next colonoscopy."―Newsweek --This text refers to the paperback edition.

---------------
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Winner of the 2018 Erasmus Prize for her work as an investigative journalist, she has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07BZVKVNB
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books (April 12, 2018)

Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #1,295,397 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
#520 in Sociology of Death (Kindle Store)
#852 in Health Care Delivery (Kindle Store)
#1,542 in Sociological Study of Medicine
Customer Reviews:
4.0 out of 5 stars 428 ratings

Biography
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia, USA.
------------------
Customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Top reviews from the United States


Scott
5.0 out of 5 stars As with all really good to great booksReviewed in the United States on April 12, 2018

I just finished reading this and closed the book with a satisfying snap. As with all really good to great books, I finished it knowing more, in the case of this book much more, than when I started.

This isn't really a book for the young, although some will get good from it. It's a book for those of us who are of a certain age, or, have parents of a certain age and are wrestling with what the means to them, and to us.

It is also not a book for devout theists of any flavor. Ehrenreich's atheism is in full view throughout the book.

Although not what I would call a consistently uplifting read, I would say that I finished the book with a sense of calm and a far better appreciation for dealing with end of life issues and thoughts that come from the existential nihilism many of feel as we get older in general. I also found it very well written and an easy read (I finished it over a couple of days). 

Although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone I know (in particular the born-again Christian types, or any other particularly religiously fanatic person), I would recommend it to a majority.

Buy the physical version. Read it. Share it with those you love. You won't regret it.

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John Techwriter
1.0 out of 5 stars The worst read of the year -- so far -- and about a very important subject: how we boomers will age and dieReviewed in the United States on April 23, 2018
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Wow, what a disappointment. Perhaps my expectations were too high? I acknowledge that I expected a lot from the writer of "Nickel and Dimed", the book that changed my tipping habits in particular and my view of the life of the low-level worker in general. And the subject matter of "Natural Causes" was perfectly in sync with my circumstances: dealing with advancing age and a cancer diagnosis. My situation has been fermenting since early 2017 and by now I've come to the conclusion that my generation, the boomers, are not going to put up with the medical / pharmaceutical / health insurance industry's standard operating procedures. Instead, we were going to take charge of our lives, our healthcare, and the manner of our death.

After reading the NY Times review of this book, and hearing the author interviewed in a Slate podcast, I put in my order to Amazon immediately. I was confident I would enjoy reading somebody who was both an excellent writer and with a solid background in science, and whose views about healthcare in later years seemed to parallel my own. My hope was that along with enjoying the book, I'd be provided with arguments I could use in endlessly frustrating discussions with doctors and insurers. (Example of a frustrating discussion: I value quality of life over quantity, but my doctors take the opposite view and plan treatment accordingly. Whose opinion should prevail? Well, whose life is it, anyway?)

With my expectations at such a high level, I was all the more unprepared for a laborious, poorly researched and prepared kvetch against the medical establishment that by its weakness made the issues at hand appear overly subjective and self-centered. Barbara Ehrenreich, what has happened to you?

If wanting to be in charge of your medical treatment means you are self-centered, I stand guilty. I don't buy into the myth of the doctor as the all-knowing oracle for curing your ills, and that the patient should be a passive partner in the treatment planning process. But I wasn't ready for Ehrenreich's attempt early on in the book to demonize the medical profession, or reject doctors' advice out of hand. Her attitude harks back to man-hating excesses of early-generation feminism as Ehrenreich equates colonoscopies with sexual assault. Or, when she interprets the (always male, she asserts) gynecologist's white jacket as identifying the dominant player in a ritual where the woman receiving a pelvic exam is deliberately positioned in a receptive position. To me this is nonsense, the fantasy of someone who feels victimized by everything and who assigns absurd motivations to her supposed oppressor. In places, this author seems to have lost touch with reality.

It doesn't get better. I have no time for new-age homeopathic practitioners, so was surprised to read this Ph D's accusation that after aligning medicine with science in the late 19th century, the profession "won its monopoly over the business of healing" by deriding homeopathy, chiropractic, and other forms of quackery as "pseudoscience." But they are!

She dismisses preventive care as mostly a scam, and even though she exercises she condemns striving for fitness as just another example of our culture of narcissism. There are worthwhile arguments to be made against the excesses of medical testing and the false promises of the fitness industry, but Ehrenreich doesn't bother to make them. Instead she merely accuses, and even the logic of her accusations doesn't add up. Her sloppy writing and gratuitous arguments undermine legitimate criticism of these subjects and so do us all a disservice.

In similar fashion, she writes off the mindfulness movement to the machinations of Silicon Valley. She accuses the software developers of drumming up the trend toward mindfulness in order to sell mindfulness-related software. How she makes this connection is beyond me. I've worked in tech since the '80s and am aware there are some mindfulness apps out there, but in this multi-billion dollar industry they fail to register on anybody's bottom line, except perhaps those of a few startups. My reading of her attack on Silicon Valley is that she doesn't like the tech industry and is using the mindfulness fad to accuse the industry of manipulation. When so many far more relevant examples are available -- Facebook's use of user data for example -- her mindfulness argument is just silly. Because it loosely ties in with the book's theme she can justify its inclusion. But her argument is at best naive and at worst disingenuous.

Our death-denying culture and the industries that profit from it are worthwhile subjects for criticism, and Ehrenreich goes after them. Logically she argues that no matter how hard we exercise, how carefully we eat, how piously we avoid tobacco and alcohol, we nevertheless will end up dead. Healthy living advocates portray age and disease as personal failings that could be avoided if only we were less self-indulgent. Fair ball, but then she goes over the top and accuses "elites" in the upper middle class of depriving working-class people of their justified enjoyment of one of the few activities that reduce their stress level: smoking. Yes, she defends the tobacco industry and criticizes rising cigarette taxes that "hurt the poor and the working class hardest." Once again in this book Ehrenreich demeans valid criticism of the wellness industry by veering off the path of logic and common sense and defending the undefendable.

Her screwy logic is used against advocates of immunotherapy, a new approach to cancer that is generating enthusiasm and research -- and in a few cases, amazing success. But no, she argues, utilizing the immune system in the fight against cancer won't work because one cell type in the immune system, the macrophage, can actually switch sides and defend malignant cells from attack. With that single example she rules out an avenue of research that has only recently become viable due to advances in technology and the mapping of the genome. (In another part of the book, she wonders if much of the massive machinery used in medical treatment these days is actually fake, constructed and installed to impress and make compliant the patient.)

I don't know what's up with Barbara Ehrenreich, who is now 76. I'm a believer in Billy Wilder's maxim, "You're only as good as the best thing you've ever done." And I can attest that Ehrenreich has done some of the best investigative writing I've read. There's got to be a reason she fails so badly with this book. To get many of her zany accusations into print she must have fought tooth and nail with her publisher and her editor. I'm guessing that her previous successes and her status as a money-making author enabled her to prevail.

This book is going to do Ehrenreich's reputation no good, and may even demean some of the good writing she has done in the past. Worse, her lazy and self-gratifying arguments trivialize a major issue facing an aging America: delivery of compassionate, patient-focused healthcare to a large population, the boomers, who have pretty much had things their way so far in life.

We boomers are not going to allow our old age to be "medicalized" as Ehrenreich astutely puts it. If treatment is required, we want to know the alternatives and make the final call. This requires on our part a considerable amount of self-education about our affliction, but the internet provides us with legitimate sources of information that enable us to become "informed patients" who have earned the right to engage in a discussion with our doctors, as opposed to listening to a dissertation about what they're going to do to us next.

We've earned the right to call a halt to endless rounds of debilitating therapy and go to palliative care. And when that is exhausted, it will be our choice to go to hospice care, preferably in-home, and with the option of assistance from our doctor at the end of life so we don't have to endure intractable pain and needless suffering for weeks or months before we expire.

I'm hopeful that my generation will achieve a high quality of life through our senior years, that we'll control our illnesses rather than the other way around, and that we will learn to accept the inevitability of age and death early on, and have the authority to determine the time and manner of our death. The infrastructure is in place but attitudes of all the players need reality adjustments: We boomers must learn to age gracefully, our caregivers must learn to work with us rather than dictate to us, and the medical options as we near life's end -- palliative and hospice based -- need to be funded sufficiently to meet the requirements of our long-lived generation. All these must come to pass, and I am disappointed this acclaimed writer was unable to move the process forward.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Ehrenreich's wit and wisdom are priceless.Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2018

What a treat it was to read this book! I’m not familiar with events at the cellular level in my body, or whatever else is going on in there, as long as it doesn’t hurt. But Ehrenreich makes this understandable, fascinating, funny, and serious at the same time. The book, however, isn’t all about cells. She takes us through a critical look at our health fads and dissects their supposed beneficial benefits. Turns out, you can eat all the kale and seaweed or whatever’s in style right now, but it won’t save you from your eventual death; we’re all going to die, right? Our deaths depend on many things we have no control over, such as cancer, a heart attack, or nuclear war. Ehrenreich also examines our burgeoning “preventive medicine” culture as a huge money-maker for doctors and hospitals, but not necessarily of much benefit to people.

I’ve always wondered why death is practically taboo in our culture; it’s treated as something to whisper about and to avoid at all cost. I’ve known lots of people who are scared to death about dying. Why? If you’re religious, you get to live in Heaven for eternity (which doesn’t sound too good to me; wouldn’t it get boring?). Or if you’re not religious, you can imagine nothingness: no pain, heartache, regrets, money issues, etc. Are we so self-centered that we can’t imagine not being alive? The takeaway: enjoy your life while you can, don’t go crazy over food or exercise fads, and go gently into that good night when your time comes.

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Jeannine B
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed...Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2018
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I'm a long-time fan of Ehrenreich; but I was disappointed with this book. Unlike Nickeled and Dimed or Bright-Sided, this takes a very big subject, has a very large thesis about it--and fails to deliver. The author excels in finding and debunking frauds and social wrongs--the treatment of poor workers or people on the skids, in particular. But her effort to take on the entire medical establishment and alternative medicine, and even whole philosophical ideas about the nature of ourselves and the world is piecemeal, of course. It falls too quickly into diatribe, substitutes gibes for real reasoning, and fails to avoid logical fallacies. The thesis is a good one, a timely one--but the book does not succeed in its exposition.

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Sharon Knettell
5.0 out of 5 stars Liberating- joyful,enlightening, funny!Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2018
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My husband and I are about the same age as Ehrenreich. Everyone thinks that if you have excellent insurance you are home free- however that does not prevent doctors from using you as a cash cow or a sa guinea pig for their latest money making office test.
She exposes the underbelly of a medical profession that is not as knowledgeable in science as one is led to believe and preys on our fear of death. I got news for you- it's going to happen.

A total joy to read- not another 10 ways to live longer crappy book. Liberating.

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Wanderer75
5.0 out of 5 stars A real help when mulling over your mortality, and that of other people.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 6, 2020
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I was diagnosed with cancer several years ago. As well as reading up on my condition, and on cancer in general (Dr Servan Schreiber; Dr Susan Love; Pr Robert Weinberg) I've been reading up on death and dying issues and on health in disease in general (Dr Sherwin Nutland; Dr Atul Gawande; Dr Paul Kalanithi; Dr Martin Winckler; Susan Sonntag; Mitzi Blennerhassett). I had reread Barbara Ehrenreich's book Smile or Die after being diagnosed, and watched one of her videos on the subject, she had managed to make me laugh when she explained how she had ranted and grovelled throughout her cancer treatment!

Some chapters of this book are in the same vein as 'Smile or Die', but the book goes much, much deeper. It's taken me several months to read it, as I looked up some of the references, and there was really much to mull over. My favourite subject was probably the one about how our immune system can betray us: as someone who has auto-immune diseases, I sometimes joke with my doctors that if my immune system was an employee, I'd fire them and replace them with someone who is competent and can do the job properly... but unfortunately I'm stuck with them for the rest of my life.

I am an atheist, like Barbara Ehrenreich, and I don't have too much of a problem facing my own mortality, i.e. the fact that once I'm dead, that's it, I cease to exist altogether, I will no longer have a stream of consciousness, and nothing will survive, no soul or anything. It doesn't frighten me as much as a 'theist', even though I spend a lot more time thinking about death (and about living my life in a good way) than them, and I started to think of death as a small chilld, due to an early experience of bereavements and then of helping out on a farm, killing and slaughtering animals for food, or going out fishing, again for food. It's quite counterintuitive but it's also the experience of other atheists I've spoken with. Similarly, we're more frightened about physical pain than 'theists', and therefore we tend to favour euthanasia, the way it's done in Netherlands (where, in 2017, the number of patients who saw their request for euthanasia declined was equal to the number of patients who saw their request for euthanasia granted) or in Belgium.
However, if I don't fear my own death, I do fear the death of people I like, and especially the death of people I love... and at the beginning of this year, I lost someone I'd known for over half my life, and who has very, very dear to me. It was incredibly difficult for me, even though I should have been relieved that they were no longer in pain. I just wanted to turn back the clock and intervene in their life several decades ago, to try and avoid them developing this disease. 

After about a fortnight, I turned to Barbara Ehrenreich's book again, to try and focus on something else than this person's death (I was really not in the mood for any light reading), and I actually found it really, really helpful, and read it again from cover to cover, with a new perspective.

 In the epilogue, Barbara Ehrenreich quotes a poem which Bertold Brecht wrote on his death bed, about how to enjoy the sound of blackbirds singing outside when you know that they will carry on singing when you're gone. This poem was one which my dearly departed loved, and to find it in this book (which I hadn't finished when he died) felt like a sign from him, even though I consider he's gone for good, and it made me smile and cry at the same time, and think of those quiet evenings spent together looking at the blossoming cherry trees and the clouds floating in the blue sky, and listening to blackbirds singing... and I felt much more at peace. Help with the grieving process wasn't something I had expected to get out of this book, I just wanted to look at my own mortality, but this book helped me more than most of the books and articles and videos I've found over the past couple of months.

I think this is a book which one would need to read several times during one's life, when one is young and death seems far away, when one has had a bereavement and death seems closer, when one starts getting health issues (not life threatening yet) and when one gets a diagnosis for a potentially life threatening condition. 

I don't know whether it would help a young person who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease, it is written from the perspective of someone who has had a good life and is ready to go (though not eager to!). However, once you're middle aged, I think you start having the same perspective, and even if you don't have any serious condition yet and are in good health, you could get covid-19, you could get a car accident, you could get food poisoning... so thinking about your death (and drawing up your will, and filling up an advanced directives form) can't hurt, and this book is extremely well suited for the job.
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William Cohen
3.0 out of 5 stars Bold in parts, boring in othersReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2020
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I like BE's searing honesty. She's great on why she's packed up having medical examinations. She explains why medical checkups are not as sensible as they seem. Doctors might make needless interventions, or you'll just get caught up in their system and spend days in windowless rooms waiting for appointments. Far better to live and if you get caught with cancer, well, you're time is up. She's also caustic about healthy eating and workmen out.

The stuff about cells was moderately interesting. But I found the ways she champions science and scorns religion just ridiculous. The pandemic has shown that people have swapped religion for science, and turned science back into a religion. We've all got to die of something.

Suffice to say, this book has dated quickly.
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Janie U
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting opinion and I love that she speaks out but I struggled with a few of the chaptersReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2019
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I've read a few books about death and the human urge to control it so was curious about this book, particularly when I had enjoyed "Nickel and Dimed" by the same author.
It is just over 200 pages and split into 12 chapters, the titles of which give hints about their contents.
I was immediately hooked into the author's style of writing in the same way of her last book I read. I'm certainly of her opinion that I want to be in control of any medical intervention. I'm 20 years younger than the author at the time she wrote this book so have a slightly difference perspective but still very strongly believe that life should not be extended artificially with no advantage.
The first four or five chapters were completely absorbing but then she strayed off topic into the science which I found much less engaging than her opinions. Once the topic headed towards society's views of aging and death, I felt more interested again. There wasn't much that I found startling but it was good to have another opinion.
I'm very much in agreement with the statement headlines in the book but think her analysis is so deep that it goes off at a few unnecessary tangents. The book did keep my attention to the end but it was a struggle.
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Ransen Owen
5.0 out of 5 stars Points out many things I had not thought aboutReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2020
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An interesting read and points out many things I had not thought about. (The most worrying personally is the very slow long lingering decline if you've been fit most of your life.)

The one criticism is that she does not mention the mystery of all this, the world, our existence. But maybe this is not the book to do it.

Still, 5 stars yes.

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Wellman
5.0 out of 5 stars Sensible bookReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2019
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At last, a knowledgeable piece of writing on an awkward subject which is familiar to us all. Written with humour, mirth and passion.
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===

Barbara Ehrenreich Urges Us to Accept, Accept the Dying of the Light 

- The New York Times

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Barbara Ehrenreich Urges Us to Accept, Accept the Dying of the Light


By Parul Sehgal
April 10, 2018


The most purely, proudly American genre of writing might be the to-do list. From Benjamin Franklin’s 13-week plan for self-optimization to young Gatsby’s daily routine (“practice elocution, poise and how to attain it”), nothing captures quite so well our essential optimism, mania for self-improvement and suspicion of leisure — not to mention the unapologetic grasping that so galled de Tocqueville.



The key word in the Declaration of Independence isn’t life, liberty or happiness, the writer Patricia Hampl has pointed out. It’s pursuit.

All this striving is getting in the way of living, Barbara Ehrenreich argues in “Natural Causes” — and it’s making dying more painful and humiliating than it needs to be.

Her new book is blunt: Nothing in modern life prepares us for the leaving of it. We treat aging as an outrage or, worse, as a sin. In our addiction to betterment, we’ve replaced “health” — an absence of sickness — with the amorphous “wellness” and a flurry of overtesting, fad diets and pointless “alternative” treatments.

“Every death can now be understood as suicide,” she writes. “We persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: Did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fiber? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death?”

At 76 years old, Ehrenreich has decided that she is old enough to die. She forswears annual exams, cancer screenings and any other measure “expected of a responsible person with health insurance.” There will be no more mammograms, no more tedious lectures, no more pawing physicians. “Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life.”

It’s reasonable, even honorable to so coolly make peace with the inevitable. But I confess wanting a bit more raging against the dying of the light. Ehrenreich is irreplaceable to the culture, with her rigor and skepticism, her allergy to comforting illusions. Only she would offer a grim riff on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“The arc of history is long,” she writes, “but it bends toward catastrophic annihilation”) as incentive to action not defeatism.

Ehrenreich has called herself a “mythbuster by trade.” In previous books, she’s assailed the positive-thinking movement (“Bright-sided”), and gone undercover to investigate low-wage work in the era of welfare reform (“Nickel and Dimed”) and middle-class job insecurity (“Bait and Switch”).

The wellness movement, as you might imagine, doesn’t stand a chance. She fillets it with ease and relish — revealing the paucity of research supporting the usefulness of everything from annual physical exams to meditation — and dismantles nostrums about the innate balance and wisdom of the body.

She introduces us to a world of dystopian “intrabody conflict.” (Ehrenreich has a Ph.D. in cellular immunology.) Our bodies are subject to randomness and even outright “conflict at the cellular level.” She cites a biologist who describes pregnancy as “maternal-fetal competition”: The fetus tries to siphon off the nutrients from the mother, whose body struggles to retain them for herself. Our immune system has been found to nourish cancer cells (“the fire department is indeed staffed by arsonists”).

“Natural Causes” is peevish, tender and deeply, distinctively odd — and often redeemed by its oddness. Ehrenreich is so offended by the American conflation of health with virtue and offers charming contrarian essays on the “defiant self-nurturance” of cigarette smoking, for example, and the dangers of eating fruit. The pleasures of her prose are often local, in the animated language, especially where scientific descriptions are concerned. Her description of cells rushing to staunch a wound is so full of wonder and delight that it recalls Italo Calvino.

There are, however, a few swan dives into near-nonsense. In arguing that the wellness epidemic seeks to prettify our body’s actual processes, she reveals a horror of menstruation — a “violent occurrence” that she claims can be “appalling, even terrifying, to the young girl who experiences it.” She rails against “pro-menstrual propaganda” that dares “normalize this.”

It’s a confusing moment of squeamishness and overstatement from a woman who was politicized as a young mother by the funky feminism of the 1970s. (There’s even a fond mention of a speculum in these pages.)

More surprising, Ehrenreich never really grapples with the obvious point that most Americans suffer from a lack — not excess — of access to basic health care. This is especially true for women of color, as the alarming rates of maternal mortality make clear.

Ehrenreich’s focus on relatively rarefied issues and pet preoccupations make it clear that this is a book born out of private not public concerns — despite masquerading as such. It possesses what the critic Helen Vendler described as “the strange binocular style” of late works, in which the writer is attentive to death’s encroaching shadow but also vividly alive to the present moment. There is a feeling of Ehrenreich getting her affairs in order, slaying a few final foes.


The wellness movement neatly dispatched, 

she sits in contemplation of death itself in the book’s concluding, very beautiful passages, bringing to it her characteristic curiosity and awe at the natural world.

 “It is one thing to die into a dead world and, metaphorically speaking, leave one’s bones to bleach on a desert lit only by a dying star,” she writes.

“It is another thing to die into the actual world, which seethes with life, with agency other than our own, and at the very least, with endless possibility.”seething definition: 1. extremely angry but unable or unwilling to express it clearly

I’m reminded of a haiku by Mizuta Masahide, the 17th-century Japanese poet who commemorated the burning down of his barn, which left him homeless: “My storehouse burned down—/now nothing stands between me/and the moon above.”
Correction: April 12, 2018

An earlier version of this review misstated the profession of Helen Vendler. She is a critic, not a poet.
Correction: April 12, 2018

An earlier version of a capsule summary with this review misstated the title of the book. It is “Natural Causes,” not "Natural States.”


Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.

Natural Causes
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
By Barbara Ehrenreich
234 pages. Twelve. $27.

---

** Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything 2014

Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything 2014

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Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition


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As a teenager Barbara Ehrenreich was an atheist and a rationalist, determined to understand the meaning of life. During this time she would regularly have minor experiences of dissociation, of seeing the world in a strange light. Then when she was 17, while on a skiing trip, she had an overwhelming, cataclysmic 'mystical' experience, far more rapturous and ecstatic than anything she had had before. The rapture would return later in life, but never with the same intensity.These episodes, and the rational Ehrenreich's ongoing argument with them, are at the core of this unique book. To try to understand the experience of some sort of force, 'out there', trying to communicate with her, Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative writer and self-described myth-buster, reads neurology, theology, philosophy, and accounts of other people's mystical experiences. Interwoven with her research is the story of the precocious adolescent that she once was, and a moving memoir of the life that shaped her.

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Review

"[Ehrenreich] resolutely avoids rhetoric in that 'blubbery vein'--which is why her book is such a rare feat...She struggles to make sense of the epiphany without recourse to the 'verbal hand-wavings about mystery and transcendence' that go with the territory... Ehrenreich has no interest in conversion...She wants, and inspires, open minds."―The Atlantic

"The questions in the world may be infinite, but perhaps the answers are few. And however we define that mystery, there's no escaping our essential obligation to it, for it may, as Ehrenreich writes, 'be seeking us out.'"―New York Times Book Review

"Ehrenreich has always been an intellectual and a journalistic badass... [She] ultimately arrives at a truce with the idea of God. You'll admire her journey."
―Entertainment Weekly

"The factor that makes each of [Barbara's] books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact."―Salon

"As personal a piece of writing as she has ever done... A surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists."―The Los Angeles Times

"Until reading LIVING WITH A WILD GOD I counted the Mary Karr memoir trilogy as my favorite from a contemporary literary figure. Now, Ehrenreich's memoir is tied for first place with Karr's books... Thank goodness [this book] exists. It is quite likely to rock the minds of readers who dare open to the first page."―Houston Chronicle

"A smart and enjoyable read... Ehrenreich maintains a grip on a sensible skepticism about religious matters - and a positive hostility toward the idea of unthinking faith - while avoiding the narrow-minded excesses that more zealous atheists sometimes fall victim to."―The Chicago Tribune --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Winner of the 2018 Erasmus Prize for her work as an investigative journalist, she has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00GPDN5GC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books (April 3, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 3, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 611 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled




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StrangePegs
4.0 out of 5 stars Not an Easy ReadReviewed in the United States on March 2, 2015
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So a bit of preamble about this one:
1. This is not a religious book, not in the traditional sense. The "God" Ehrenreich is talking about is not the Christian god nor any kind of monotheistic god. It is not god in any sense that we generally think about "God."
2. I've previously read a couple other of Ehrenreich's books (Nickel and Dimed and Bright-sided) and really enjoyed them. She approaches her topics with dogged determination and doesn't let go till she gets to the truth of the matter. I've never, however, taken the time to learn anything about her other than that she was a journalist who eased into books. As it turns out, her background is in science and she, in fact, has a PhD in... well, I forget in what, because she shifted what she was studying numerous times, and I forget what the doctorate finally ended up being in (and I don't feel like trying to find it, now). Something to do with immunology, though, I think. The science background explains why her investigative work has always been so thorough, though.

Speaking of science, this book contains a lot of hard science, descriptions and explanations, things I found fascinating (especially her experience with the silicon oscillations), but I can understand this being a barrier to many (maybe most?) readers. In fact, I scanned through some of the negative reviews of the book and many of them had to do with "too much science" or "I couldn't understand all the science." This book is definitely not written to be easily accessible to a large audience as her other books are. This book is personal, so all of the science, which is intensely personal to her, is left in. I'm not sure the book can even get to where it's trying to go without the science.

The other thing that can be an issue with the book is that it takes Ehrenreich a long time to get where she's going. She mentions in the foreword that there was an "event," a mystical experience, that happened to her when she was a teenager and that figuring out exactly what that was was part of the impetus for Living with a Wild God, so you start reading and expect to find out about this event and her quest, but... what you get is her childhood. And it was a horrible childhood, not that it seems she saw it that way at the time. When you grow up in that, though, you think it's normal.

It takes a long time to get to the event and, the whole time I was reading, I kept wondering what the point was of all the stuff she was telling me. Why did I want or need to know about her childhood and, well, everything else? But I trusted her, based on my prior reading experience with her (and the story she was telling really was interesting even though it seemed as if it had nothing to do with what the book was supposed to be about), to be going somewhere, so I kept reading. Then, eventually, we do get to the event, and it all made sense. I mean, without all of the background (and I do mean all of the background), I don't think you can really understand the significance of what happened and what happened after.

So I'm going to go back and say that this is not a religious book. This is not a book about how some atheist went out searching for the Truth and had a conversion experience (as in The Case for Christ). This is a book about an atheist who went out searching for the Truth and found... something. Something unexplainable. Something that isn't the "good and loving" god that Christians so often hold up as a happiness dispenser. What she found was something... primal. Chaotic. Only "good" in the sense that a storm can be good or a forest fire can be good.

This is not a book for people who already think they know it all and who think they have all the answers, especially about who and what god is. This is a book for those, like in Wizard of Oz, who are willing to look behind the curtain. Don't plan on an easy read.

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S. Magliocco
4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir of an Extraordinary Spiritual ExperienceReviewed in the United States on May 17, 2016
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Part memoir, part inquiry into extraordinary experience, Barbara Ehrenreich's _Living With a Wild God_ offers stirring insights into the life of this important feminist author and cultural critic. Spurred by the rediscovery of a diary from her teen years, the author explores aspects of her family background, upbringing, and youth that led her to have an extraordinary spiritual experience just before she went to college. Because of her family's ideology and the general social taboo against speaking of these kinds of experiences, as well as their ineffable quality, Ehrenreich buried her experience and never spoke of it. But this silence ultimately took its toll on her life, until the need to rediscover and explore it in full made itself known to her in late middle age.
As a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying extraordinary experiences across cultures, I was very familiar with the kind of experience she described; it is, perhaps, not so extraordinary, but part of the register of human experiences that lead to the development of spiritual beliefs. What fascinated me more were the details of childhood and young adulthood the author reveals, and the transformation that made her care passionately about the world we inhabit and want to make it a better place. That story gets relatively short shrift in this memoir, but it's the one that really captivated me as I read it.

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kb from la
4.0 out of 5 stars At first disappointing, but then...Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2014
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Barbara Ehrenreich is an author whose books were important influences on my generation of feminist/socialists. Hearts of Men and Nickle and Dimed are classics. So when I saw that, now in her 70s, she’s produced a book on spirituality I was eager to read it.

Living with a Wild God focuses on a set of dissociative moments experienced by Ehrenreich during her childhood and teen years. Uncanny insights into the nature of being? Encounters with the divine? Brain freeze explosions? An atheist, Ehrenreich refuses to give a conventional religious interpretation to what happened. In fact she doesn’t want to corrupt the purity of experience by interpreting or defining these moments at all. Okay, but then why write a book that keeps circling back to these incidents only to back away from explaining why they feel so crucial to her life story?

What results from all this is a weirdly unsatisfying memoir. We get the story of a brainly misfit growing up in a dysfunctional household headed by an alcoholic father and miserably unhappy, abusive mother. Ehrenreich’s enjoyably snarky voice, which works so well in most of her writing, falls flat here. Other than a nicely mean account of her adolesence in LA (like the Kerouac of Big Sur, she hates the California sun) the author skates along the surface of her life story, meting out a kind of impersonal contempt to everyone including her solipsistic youthful self. High school, college, grad school, marriage, motherhood, the anti-war movement… blah, blah.

I was now, according to my kindle, 80% of the way through the book. Suddenly, bam! A whole new kind of writing starts happening. In a deeply personal tone, Ehrenreich tells us why she wrote Living with a Wild God. Middle aged, with her second marriage crumbling and progressive politics rapidly diminishing as a force in American political life, she sank into depression. (How many of us followed that trajectory?) Returning to investigate her youthful dips into the twilight zone offered itself as a strategy to beat back the pain and sadness. In turn, engaging new sources of knowledge outside of what might be called the rationalist paradigm seems to have given Ehrenreich the healing energy to do ever more good work.

I’m still of two minds about her book. Why the choice of such a dispassionate, skeptical mode of address to narrate the story of her early life? But on balance, whatever Barbara Ehrenreich cares to say, I’m glad to listen.

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k
5.0 out of 5 stars I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- althoughReviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016
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Ehrenreich is a cynical observer of American life and she finds it hypocritical and full of artifice. She is dead-on! Now, I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- although I'd be fired in a nonce!

Ms E was raised an atheist, claims she still is one (sort-of) and has an impressive scientific background (PhD cellular biology.) Her greatest fear in life, or at least one of them, is to be taken as a fool. At the same time, she has an integrity that many lack: she does not privilege one aspect of reality over any others and this quality is absolutely bedrock for sound thinking. Part of HER reality has been a series of extraordinary experiences that even she, the original Show-Me Gal, describes as mystical.

Toward the end of this book Ms E asserts that those who have emptied themselves of ego and made "room" for "Whatever" they "encounter" (Ms E stresses this word) are more likely to have this type of mystical experience. Her own testimony, however, belies this. No one has a stronger ego than the cynical Ms E and her account of her own life indicates she never, even as a child, made room for anything other than her own priorities. And, still . . . "it" happened to her all the same.

That is not unusual. For example, the great 19th century revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, was a mundane lawyer and a bit of a skeptic to boot when one evening, entirely unbidden, "it" descended upon him. What Christians call the "Holy Spirit,", a Presence that "like the wind, listeth where it will" -- and, in fact, that quote is from the Bible in reference to this phenomenon -- hit him with gale force,

These various personal encounters have in common features which make nonsense of conventional religiosity. The "God" who reveals himself is not the Deity of the Sunday Schools anymore than it is the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Mr E calls it a "Wild God" and that accords with the testimony of others. What reveals Itself has variously been described as "savage" and even "primitive." "It" is simply not like anything in "our" world -- rather, it is something utterly alien.

These encounters usually fill the recipient with an ecstatic joy so excessive that it is frightening and potentially destructive. Finney recalled that as wave after wave of love washed over him he pleaded with God to relent lest he, Finney, be destroyed. Muhammed, we are told, was near-suicidal after his "encounter." If we call this experience "God," then He is "beyond good and evil" (paradoxically, a quote from the same philosopher who proclaimed that "God is dead.) Some who have had this experience found it terrifying because they experienced God as absolutely void of all qualities -- an eternal, vast emptiness. (In fact, this makes a sort of sense -- for, if God has a quality, by human definition, then He is limited since that precludes his possessing all other qualities. Thus, He is, like "white light" -- impossible to see but possessing all colors.)

The sort of terrifying encounter Ms E describes makes a mockery of all morality, custom, conventions and, most especially, theology. What is encountered is so far beyond human ken that the mind jumps at once to the Biblical warning, "My ways are not your ways." The one who experiences this epiphany is usually left drained -- in some cases his or her personality is temporarily shattered.

There are many who ascribe these experiences to mental illness or something-or-other firing in some-way-or-another in the synapses of the brain. That is as it may be. The experience itself, however, is most remarkable for the insistence of nearly all who have undergone it that what is encountered is utterly alien to humanity. "It" is the temporary presence of a Being, if that is the right word (Ms E, like all others who have gone through this, describe it as a living presence), that is unlike any fact, theory or extrapolation from theory that humankind can muster. It can be experienced but not known. It can be (somewhat) remembered but never, even in the least, understood. It is at once joyful and savage, loving and terrifying. It is wholly "Other."

How one regards Ms E's experience is up to the reader. But, her account seems honest and as descriptive as she can manage by way of liming what can not be described. "It" makes nonsense of all our assumptions about "God" and even "reality."

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Barry J.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, quite a woman, and quite a tale - great storytelling, and lots of insight.Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018
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As an atheist ex altar boy, I have a certain sensitivity for book titles that sound like they might be preaching to the agnostic or atheist choir, or at least to me. This was one of those that appeared in a list of her previous work, ALL of which I wanted to read, based only on the title. I resolved to start with a single book and see what I thought about her and the subject matter and I didn't know what else. Given the aformentioned sensitiviity, this was the one I chose, and spent a totally involved, smiling, enthralled number of hours, spread over perhaps 2 weeks reading and going back over, and reading further, and smiling a bit more. I haven't had this much fun or enlightenment out of a book since Catch 22.
I could go on, but I won't. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you'll be a better person for it. And just so we're clear, you'll be a better person even if you're NOT an atheist.

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Judith Kelsey-Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius and courageReviewed in the United States on January 26, 2015
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In this extraordinary memoir, the stepping of point is the revisiting adolescent musings about the nature and meaning of life addressed to an older self. There is something special about someone who would first trust herself to keep those pages and then years later treat them seriously. She suggests that perhaps if she had a family religious tradition she might have a framework within which to understand an experience she can only describe as mystic, but as a third generation atheist, she was left with psychiatric explanations that seemed inadequate.
This is a work that deserves to take its place next to Henry James and Rudolf Otto, not because it finds answers to the basic questions of human existence, but precisely because it does not. It makes the quest itself central and is willing to posit the notion that we may in fact know far less about the universe than we might like or even need to believe (the concept of belief itself being problematic). Most importantly for me, there is a recognition that experiencing the Other does not frequently reveal transcendent benevolence. This is truly the wild God of the title, not the domesticated Being commonly understood by contemporary adherents of religion.
This is a compelling work worthy of revisiting by the reader and perhaps by the writer. This is a quest that is not readily concluded.

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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars FascinatingReviewed in the United States on May 14, 2017
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I was intrigued by her story. Relentless self-critical and observant, as well as extremely smart, she seemed at first to be the ultimate introvert, forever trying to find an explanation for everything. (Of course as she matured she mostly gave up that goal and succumbed the middle-class life that captures almost everyone.) She had a life-changing experience at age 17, which I wish she had explained more fully. I also wish she had taken psychedelic drugs and reported on her experience and compared it to the "world on fire" that she saw internally. It's odd that the best description in her book of such an experience was by Daniel Quinn on p. 216: "Everything was on fire...Every blade of grass, every single tree was radiant, was blazing - incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine...But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation's everlasting, silent hallelujah." Sounds a lot like my first mushroom trip. Barbara is one of a kind.

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Athena
3.0 out of 5 stars A smart mind struggling with an experienceReviewed in the United States on July 13, 2016
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Very interesting discussion of an experience of the world that could be considered religious or mystical. The author is a non-believer who seems to feel that there must be something to believe about the world. But what? Her experience of the world seems to suggest more to the world than the insignificant bits of energy that "accidentally" created it. But the author does not discuss the philosophy of science to any degree. Instead, she discusses the experience of life itself that kept recurring throughout her life, and shows it as a challenge and mystery to her. She attempts to reduce it to psychological states. I found it a very interesting look into an intelligent mind.

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Pagan Tart
3.0 out of 5 stars Ehrenreich held backReviewed in the United States on May 7, 2014
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Erenreich had a moment when she was 17 when the world around her seemed to burst into flames. It seemed, at least to her, it was almost a holy or mystical experience or a brain malfunction. After she writes about this and her description is excellent, the book wanders off to a telling of her life. Enrenreich has led an interesting life, but i wanted to know more about this world of flame experience she had. It is not until the last few page she gets around to this by explaining what exists in the universe and the energy and playfulness the universe seems to display and it is not until the last line where she writes, "it seems to be seeking us." Well, for me, i wanted a bit more and i had hoped the book would go into more about this experience sooner. I felt she was holding back and did not want to admit the universe may have a purpose. She can write only one sentence at the very end of the book that maybe there's something going on that perhaps could lead to a fuller understanding of the Cosmos and its mysteries?

I wanted to say, c'mon Ehrenreich, you're an excellent writer, scientist, journalist, don't hold back. What are you afraid of?

Pat Mckeage

I would like to add more. It has been a month or more since i read her book and have loaned it to a friend. After thinking it over in the past hour she as said more than i previously thought. My husband of 56 years recently died and i was too impatient for an answer and yes, i did want a more clear, positive answer that "there's something out there." While i do not take back entirely my previous thoughts, her book i now realize is almost pure genius.

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Jean E. Peterson
3.0 out of 5 stars Living with a Wild God.Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2014
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I found the title amusing as the author doesn't like to use that word or anything spiritual or meta-physical. It was a hard book for me to read.How she had to dis-associate from the mixed messages she received, from her father to" question everything" and her mother who said she " wasn't special". Her mother seemed the more abusive,slapping her,etc.But the parents nightly alcohol- fused fights left no safe place for her, but science which became her God. She is extremely bright, a fact she likes to remind the reader of with her technical logic and expressions. Besides knowledge I didn't get a sense of what she loved, no mention of marriages or parental feelings. The last of the book in her response to nature I think she finally felt at home. Her being an atheist seemed beside the point. How she survived as well as she did is the what I find valuable in her life story.

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===

Insights on Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God 

 https://www.scribd.com/read/595630440/Summary-of-Barbara-Ehrenreich-s-Living-with-a-Wild-God?mode=standard

Contents 

 

Insights from Chapter 1 

Insights from Chapter 2 

Insights from Chapter 3 

Insights from Chapter 4 

Insights from Chapter 5 

Insights from Chapter 6 

Insights from Chapter 7 

Insights from Chapter 8 

Insights from Chapter 9 

Insights from Chapter 10 

Insights from Chapter 11 

Insights from Chapter 12

===

1

Insights from Chapter 1 

 

#1 

 

I set my goal for life, which was to find out why we are here. I read everything I could get my hands on, from popularized science to the Romantic poets, and 

looked for patterns everywhere. I never thought to look at religion. 

 

#2 

 

I was raised in a atheist family, and I never had any doubts about my belief. It was not easy being an atheist in the great Cold War, but I never gave up because I 

knew there had to be a reason for everything. 

 

#3 

 

My family moved a lot, and I went to eleven different schools by the time I graduated from high school. Butte, Montana, was our mythical touchstone and stan- 

dard of authenticity. We didn’t take crap from anyone, and we never will. 

 

#4 

 

Butte, Montana, was the home of the Big Sky, and it was here that men went to escape from the sky. They dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, and 

then built the smelters to blur the sky with toxic smoke. 

 

#5 

 

I grew up in a world engaged in a war against children. We were the intruders, and we could do nothing right. We were subject to constant rebuke at home and 

in school. 

 

#6 

 

I had many childhood memories of my mother being angry and cursing, and my father being absent. I wanted to understand and predict their behavior. 

 

#7 

 

I hated school, and would often vomit in the morning before going to it. I was a child, and my parents were driving me crazy with their ambition and drive. I 

respected them, even as I rebelled against them. 

 

#8 

 

I was always driven to explore, to get outdoors and see new places. I didn’t require answers, just a hill to climb, a corner to turn, a shore to run along. 

 

#9 

 

I came to hate the built environment, both for its dullness and the way it shut me out. I was an outdoorsy kid, and I enjoyed exploring both the physical world 

and books. I had no limits on my outdoor life, especially after my father taught me to ride a bike. 

 

#10 

 

I had no idea there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, until much later in life. I had no control over the future, so I didn’t 

think about it. 

 

#11 

 

The fact of death was not explained to me, and I had no evidence to support the continuation of the world without me. So if death stalked the world, cutting 

down kittens and heroes alike, there was still no reason to think it would come for me. 

 

#12 

 

I was 13 years old when I realized that I was going to die. I didn’t want to grow up, which was seen as a defection to the enemy side. I was being recruited into 

the great death march of biology: be born, reproduce, and die.

==

2

Insights from Chapter 2 

 

#1 

 

I began my journal as typing practice, but I soon realized that I was actually writing about my thoughts and experiences. I was desultory about my summer in 

Lowell, but I loved reading in the library. 

 

#2 

 

I discovered that writing was a powerful aid to thinking. I could think without writing, but if I could condense today’s thought into a few symbols preserved on 

a surface of some kind, I didn’t have to rethink it tomorrow. 

 

#3 

 

My father was a scientist, and he was able to save himself from the mines by attending the Butte School of Mines. He was interested in the crystal structure of 

minerals, and he wanted to know what he was up against in the mines. 

 

#4 

 

I had a rule that I always thought in complete sentences. This was a way to keep me from going under when the waters were rising, for example, on one of 

those pale winter Sunday afternoons when my father spent time drinking on the couch. 

 

#5 

 

I had to figure out the bare minimum of incontestable facts that any philosophical inquiry should start with, and this led me to confront the problem of the 

reliability of other people. I began to realize that the real sign of mental deterioration was that I had allowed myself to be dismayed by the news that my IQ had 

taken a dive. 

 

#6 

 

I wanted to believe that my parents were trustworthy sources, but they were also constantly arguing with each other and pointing out the flaws in the people 

around us. They would never offer me up to God. 

 

#7 

 

I had once trusted my mother to help me with my quest, but she had soon after insulted me by asking why I had nothing to do. It was many years before I real- 

ized that the question had been a grave personal insult. 

 

#8 

 

My mother’s worst crime was to accuse me of having incestuous designs on my father. She didn’t provide any evidence, but she announced as a scientific fact 

that girls are sexually attracted to their fathers. I didn’t write about this in my journal, because it was a private matter. 

 

#9 

 

I stopped listening to my mother when she began to warn me that I was unattractive to men because I was cold and withdrawn. I understood that no one could 

have thrown such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on. 

 

#10 

 

If you can’t trust your parents, who are intelligent and au courant, then you can't trust much of anything. This includes science. You are completely dependent 

on scientists for your information about electrons, planets, and genes, and you must assume that they are telling the truth about their observations and infer- 

ences. 

 

#11 

 

I spent a weekend at a Baptist summer camp, and while I was there, I wrote in my journal that I was surprised by how nice the campers were. But then I wrote 

that they were also super religious, and that I didn’t like that. 

 

#12 

 

I began to question the entire logical enterprise of reaching the outside world from within the limits of I. I tried to escape the straitjacket of I with a more imper- 

sonal formulation: There is Something, and there is Nothing, where Something included both the perceiver and the perceived. 

 

#13 

 

I was a failure at the one task I had been given: to exist. I existed, but only as a condition of constant desiring and yearning. I knew nothing, and I existed only to 

seek knowledge. 

 

#14 

 

I had always been fascinated by religion, and when I was 14 and 15, I converted to Christianity. But when I was in high school, I realized that I didn’t believe in 

any of it. I was trying to blend in at a CYO Friday night dance, when I decided to formally renounce Christianity. 

 

#15 

 

I tried to practice my newfound religion in secrecy, but I couldn’t resist the allure of hamburgers. I was also hungry for books and information, and I couldn’t 

stop asking why. 

 

#16 

 

I had glimpsed the vast, glassy-calm, blood-warm sea of Brahman and refused to submerge myself in it. I knew I was a part of this universe, but I was also 

apart from it. I didn’t fully trust the Brahman any more than I did Descartes’s perfect God.

==

3

Insights from Chapter 3 

 

#1 

 

I didn’t write about the incommunicable events I was experiencing, because I was afraid of how they would be interpreted. I was trying to reserve the journal for 

mini-essays on topics like chance and determinism, the appeal of religion, and whether the passage of time is an illusion. 

 

#2 

 

I had a experience as a child where I lost my sense of language, and it was terrifying. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, I would have said I was 

looking at a tree, but the word tree was gone. 

 

#3 

 

I decided that whatever I had experienced at the horse show was an aberration, like the retinal floaters that sometimes intrude on your vision after being in the 

car too long on a hot bright day. I was a chronic insomniac since grade school, and I often read at night until my eyes were too tired to read anymore. 

 

#4 

 

I struggled to identify the precipitating factors of my hallucinations, if not physiological then atmospheric. I came up with my own explanation: the most rou- 

tine perception requires an impressive creative effort. Photons don’t just stamp a little image on the visual cortex. 

 

#5 

 

I was an empiricist, and I believed that I had gained a glimpse into another universe. I was not ready to abandon the idea that I had gained a privileged view into 

some alternative realm. I was adamantly disinclined to anything that smacked of mysticism. 

 

#6 

 

I experienced episodes of dissociation, which are described in the psychiatric literature as feeling unreal. These episodes happened often enough that they be- 

came a disease. 

 

#7 

 

I was always concerned about committing treason where my family was concerned. I was expected to contribute to the real world as a scientist when I grew up, 

but I didn’t want to fall off the planet into a personal orbit of my own. 

 

#8 

 

I had debates with Bernice about God, and I tried to explain to her that belief takes effort, and that she was making an unnatural demand by asking me to be- 

lieve in her God. She retorted that atheists were immoral. 

 

#9 

 

I was not going to share my intraspecies communication with anyone, including my atheistic, Latin-loving rationalism. I was convinced that humans can only 

experience things that have already been named, alphabetized, and stored in a single volume. 

 

#10 

 

The experience of dissociation is often described as a symptom of a disorder, but for me it was simply a symptom of my atheism. It was difficult for me to be- 

lieve in the existence of other people, let alone God. 

 

#11 

 

I was not unhappy, and I did not write about it because I was too busy discovering and absorbing the world around me. I was an answer-seeking machine, in 

love with what I called the truth.

==

4

Insights from Chapter 4 

 

#1 

 

I understood that the concept of home was badly in need of updating before it expired altogether when I reached 18, which was when I would age out like a fos- 

ter child and be released to the streets or, should I qualify, to college. 

 

#2 

 

I moved to Los Angeles with my shoulders hunched against the threat of corruption. I was initially excited about the modernity of the city, but after experi- 

encing the Church of All Religions, I realized how strange and different it was from anything I had ever seen before. 

 

#3 

 

I loved the city’s sprawl, which testified to an excess of space. I was right to be on guard, though, as I quickly learned that there were no dark interstitial spaces 

in which to get trapped in Lowell. 

 

#4 

 

I had come to believe that it was up to me to decide how much to be involved with the growing category of other people. I had chided myself for my aloofness, 

and promised to change it someday when the opportunity arose. But now the personality test raised the possibility that I might not belong here. 

 

#5 

 

I began to think of myself as a rebel, and no one should judge me based on my conservative political beliefs, because at least I was trying to connect with other 

people. 

 

#6 

 

I made a few friends at school, and I lived not far from David, who would have been my boyfriend if such a concept had ever arisen between us. But mostly, I 

spent time with Marina, who introduced me to the bohemian scene in Los Angeles. 

 

#7 

 

I admired Marina, more so than any of my previous friends, because I knew that of the two of us she was the true Nietzschean. She understood better than I 

did that hilarity is the best response to absurdity. 

 

#8 

 

I wanted people to respond to me and each other demonstratively. I wanted them to rush up to me and say, What is this. What is happening here. 

 

#9 

 

When someone wanders so far from the flock, people tend to blame the flock. They say that the wanderer was actively pushed away by family dysfunction, so- 

cial disappointment, or sexual rejection. Or maybe it was the wanderer’s fault, and she lost her way because she failed to cultivate the appropriate intraspecies 

bonds. 

 

#10 

 

I was a product of my family’s peculiar dynamics and the fact that we moved so often. I had no interest in playing out the family drama, however, because the 

environment in Los Angeles was so hostile. 

 

#11 

 

I had thought of the dissociative experience as a place, but since I had no control over my access to it, there was a possibility that something else was respon- 

sible for taking me there. But since there were no candidates for such a role, I figured that science could explain everything. 

 

#12 

 

I was attracted to chemistry because it was a world full of drama and intrigue. Physics wanted to squeeze the life out of nature, but chemistry revealed that 

underneath the calm surface of things, there exists a realm exempt from brute gravity where atoms and molecules are in constant motion. 

 

#13 

 

I was forced to study science, and I hated it. It was a waste of my time, and I felt like it was turning me into someone who could only think about science. I 

didn’t want to be like my mother, who was driven crazy by the pressure of unchanneled energy. 

 

#14 

 

The question of why there is anything at all became more urgent as science discovered that amoebae could have intentions. If everything else was already dead 

or determined, how to explain this tiny perturbation that was human life.

==

5

Insights from Chapter 5 

 

#1 

 

I had a fantasy that I was the only person left alive on earth. I woke up one morning and rushed to my car to get somewhere I was afraid of being late to. The 

streets were empty and the traffic lights were dead. 

 

#2 

 

I realize that I need to establish a base. It should be a house with a swimming pool to serve as a cistern, and definitely with a wall around it to keep out the 

dogs, which have clawed their way out of their homes. 

 

#3 

 

I had to become self-entertaining when I was in high school. I would read books that were banned, and I would conceal them inside useless civics textbooks. I 

would not listen to the adults around me, and I would imagine that other people were like me. 

 

#4 

 

I was contemptuous of Nietzsche, who looked down on his fellow humans, and I even doubted the reality of the physical world and the dead objects that filled 

it. I didn’t need other people, and I didn’t believe they needed anything from me. 

 

#5 

 

If I hadn’t killed my mother, this would have been her chance to prove that I always thought I was above it all, but how useless I had turned out to be. I had 

never fully noticed the huge human mobilization that was required to keep me alive day after day. 

 

#6 

 

I had a blind spot when it came to recognizing the importance of what kept my mind alive. I failed to acknowledge or account for what kept my mind alive, and 

I was completely dependent on novels, philosophy, science updates, and random shreds of information. 

 

#7 

 

I was reading a lot of fiction and philosophy, and I was also reading science. I was beginning to see that the world I had lived in all my life was changing, and 

that the material world was nothing more than a collection of objectively verifiable particles. 

 

#8 

 

I couldn’t picture an electron, so I couldn’t picture its location. I didn’t take this as a putdown, but rather as a lesson that science is not about imagining things 

or trying to picture them in your head. It is about making measurements, which can then be fed into equations. 

 

#9 

 

I knew that my father loved science, and I knew that he would not believe in the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. I was offended by the implication that quan- 

tum mechanics was some soft-minded adolescent reverie. 

 

#10 

 

The new physics was a mockery of the whole Cartesian, Newtonian edifice of knowledge, in which one thing leads to another and nothing is going to leap out 

and poke you in the eye. 

 

#11 

 

The fantasy of a world without humans turned darker as I got older. I could not figure out how to drain the pool I intended to capture rainwater in, and I be- 

came grubbier, skinnier, and crustier.

==

6

Insights from Chapter 6 

 

#1 

 

My family had a history of skiing, and I had learned to ski when I was twelve. We went skiing in Mammoth Mountain in Northern California, and spent the night 

in Lee Vining near Mono Lake. But the next day, we drove east into Death Valley. 

 

#2 

 

The trip went wrong when Dick, my friend, became angry and hostile. I was shocked by his anger, and didn’t know how to respond. I had never been close with 

him, and we hadn’t even talked alone before. 

 

#3 

 

I began to realize that the pleasure of human company had been exaggerated. I was looking at the challenge of condensing the universe into a form compact 

enough to fit in my head, while leaving nothing out. The desert was too big to be compacted down into anything manageable. 

 

#4 

 

The dream was a single image: the human brain, projected onto a screen in what appeared to be a classroom. I was shocked by the sac of tissue enclosed in 

membrane, a thing like anything else. I was impaled to the floor by the residue of the dream. 

 

#5 

 

If we had driven straight on to L. A. , I would have ended the night in my bed and none of the rest might have happened. I would have gone back to being a nor- 

mal geeky, alienated adolescent. 

 

#6 

 

I had a difficult time tracking down Dick, the old man I had met in 1959. His mother had been a published writer, and his father had been a police officer, and 

his family had moved a lot. I eventually found him through the Internet, and he denied any car trouble. He insisted that there was nothing odd about sleeping in a 

car on the side of the road. 

 

#7 

 

I had no inner nurse practitioner to tell me it was time for some food and a rest. I simply walked east to where the sky was lightest. The street I was on held a 

few grudging concessions to commercialism, but nothing was open. 

 

#8 

 

The experience was not a passive beatific merger with the All. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at 

once. I stopped at some point in front of a secondhand store, transfixed by the blinding glow of the most mundane objects. 

 

#9 

 

I had the sense that the story ended there, or at least that was how I felt for years. I couldn’t speak of it because I didn’t have the words, and I couldn’t recapture 

the experience. Something had happened to me, but it seemed to have happened to me rather than for me or for my benefit. 

 

#10 

 

I had imagined that I was the consummate teenage solipsist, capable of deleting people at will from my field of consciousness, but Dick had apparently had no 

qualms about actually killing them if they happened to be in the way. 

 

#11 

 

The author’s conversation with Dick showed him to be extremely defensive and psycho analyze-able, which the author did not appreciate. He was also ex- 

tremely angry and blew up when the author tried to talk to him about being self-destructive.

==

7

Insights from Chapter 7 

 

#1 

 

I have lost my youth. The universe has no purpose. Life is a joke in poor taste. I have suffered. I have crossed the shadow line. Now I am writing this on pur- 

pose so it will look silly to me and not be true. 

 

#2 

 

I had a very different interpretation of what happened in the mountains than what was reported in the media. I did not lose something, but found something 

that now I could no longer recapture. I had never been able to experience peace or comfort after that. 

 

#3 

 

When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and ineffable, they often call it God as if that were some sort of explanation. But I knew that 

this was not about enlightenment but about chemistry. 

 

#4 

 

The experience of epiphany is best understood as an explosion, a calamitous natural process like an earthquake or storm, leaving behind what is known in sci- 

ence fiction as a rent in the fabric of space-time. Something is broken. Things no longer cohere. 

 

#5 

 

I had developed a hostility towards Frank, the guitar player, after he tried to sexually assault me. I hated him, not because he had done anything to me, but be- 

cause he was a low-tipping customer who knew everything about everything and was virtuous at the top of his voice. 

 

#6 

 

I was a 110-pound girl who had developed new powers. I could go all day without eating anything more than a few cookies. I could put out cigarettes in the 

palm of my hand. I was determined to put the broken world back together. 

 

#7 

 

I had to figure out what the raw materials were and whether there was some pattern or arrangement they needed to achieve. I could not figure out what the pat- 

tern was, and I was a failure. I could not fulfill my assigned task and hold the world together. 

 

#8 

 

I had a friend who had a miscarriage. I was shocked at how low she could feel, and I wanted to avoid being involved in any way. I couldn’t remember how the 

evening ended, but this was not good behavior. 

 

#9 

 

I knew something was wrong, as I used the word madness to describe my episodes of self-dissolution. I realized that my symptoms could be subsumed under 

schizophrenia, which was a ticket to a lifetime in a locked ward. 

 

#10 

 

I did not have schizophrenia, if schizophrenia is even a single meaningful disorder. I did not have a religion, and I believe that would have helped me during 

my post-epiphany crack-up. 

 

#11 

 

I was leaving my family, which had always traveled as a unit before. I had failed in my five-year-long quest for the truth, but I knew something that I hadn’t 

known before. Everything was over, and everything was just beginning.

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8

Insights from Chapter 8 

 

#1 

 

I was saved by institutionalization, medevaced out of the family home and delivered from my solitary fugue into a crush of new people. I had a choice between 

Stanford and Reed, the two leading eastern schools, and chose Reed for its bohemian reputation and its proximity to Mount Hood, where I imagined I would 

spend all my weekends skiing. 

 

#2 

 

I was initially planning on studying everything in Portland, from philosophy to science. But after reading the frivolity of Plato’s Symposium, I transferred into 

glassblowing instead. 

 

#3 

 

I graduated college during the great surge of scientific reductionism, which believed that big, visible things were the result of tiny, invisible things. The hier- 

archy of the intellectual edifice was that the social sciences were ultimately reducible to biology, which was in turn reducible to chemistry. 

 

#4 

 

I had always thought that science was a remote and improbable adventure, but as I began to study it, I realized that it involved working in laboratories. I was no 

klutz, but I had never disassembled a machine or traced the flow of kinetics through an automobile engine. 

 

#5 

 

I was not a fan of lab work, and I lacked the patience required for it. I was also not a fan of organic chemistry, and I would often cheat on the tests by going 

through the chemical supply room and sniffing everything until I found an olfactory match for my mystery substance. 

 

#6 

 

I was in love with Steve, and I did not care what he thought about it. I loved him, and I did not care what he thought about it. I was a self-proclaimed logical 

positivist who disdained all nonquantitative observations. 

 

#7 

 

When Steve asked me to marry him and transfer to the University of Oregon, I said yes, although it was months before we dared reveal this plan to our families. 

I introduced Steve to my parents during the Christmas break of my second year in college, to startling effect. 

 

#8 

 

I had no idea that Jews never married out of their race. I knew that Steve was Jewish, and had even heard his mother refer to me as the shiksa, as if unaware that 

I had access to a translator. I was ashamed of my father for the first time in my life. 

 

#9 

 

I married Steve, but for reasons that had nothing to do with our ancestral religions. We had a very undefined vision of married life. We would have to find a way 

to make money, and where would we live. 

 

#10 

 

The impact of phages on twentieth-century biology can be compared to the impact of animal domestication on Neolithic humans. Phages are viruses that prey 

on bacteria, and their impact on twentieth-century biology was far more elegant and minimal than that of animal domestication. 

 

#11 

 

I was awarded a degree in chemical physics, and was set to work on my senior thesis project with the classical mechanics professor Jean Delord. I couldn’t get 

just one value to record, and the electrode potential of p-type silicon never attained a steady value. 

 

#12 

 

In a laboratory, the objects of interest are supposed to be dead, as they are in a morgue or at least very near death at the time of their arrival. If you want to 

study cells, you have to kill them first. 

 

#13 

 

I was in charge of only one thing: the switch that supplied the power that set the whole ungovernable chain of events into action. When I decided to bike home 

at the end of the evening, through the rain and fog of a Portland night, the party was over. 

 

#14 

 

I had been up against a living antagonist, a low-level demiurge, that was trying to protect the surface of semiconductors from the etchings and other torments 

inflicted by humans. I had encountered something higher up in the chain of command than a normal demiurge. 

 

#15 

 

I had found waves in my thesis, but the physics faculty said that it was impossible to report something completely anomalous that had never been observed 

before. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools. 

 

#16 

 

I had found a way to bypass the tedium of math and science, and I used it to find a way to finish college early. I had accumulated a number of articles on the 

odd behavior of silicon electrodes, and I had read in most cases at least the abstract, discussion, and conclusion. 

 

#17 

 

The old science, which was based on the idea that tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the 

macroscopic world as we know it, has been abandoned.

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9

Insights from Chapter 9 

 

#1 

 

I was horrified by my mother’s sister Jean’s accusation that I was selfish and mean. She assumed that I would have dissuaded my mother from trying to kill 

herself, but anyone could see that she was spiraling toward ruin. 

 

#2 

 

In 1964, my mother moved to Ames, Iowa, with my siblings to be closer to her sister and mother. She began drinking excessively, and would spend hours talk- 

ing nonstop into the evening. I was expected to participate in the new ritual she had developed since her divorce. 

 

#3 

 

I had spent the last few weeks of the summer in Istanbul, attending an international summer school in quantum chemistry, with no regular access to a phone. 

My mother couldn’t reach me when she was on the verge of suicide, because I had no phone access. 

 

#4 

 

I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics, but I soon realized that I would have to switch courses and 

focus on biology. The organization of lab work was feudal, with each scientist having a fiefdom of students. 

 

#5 

 

I had been assigned to a machine-tender position at a laboratory, and when I saw an announcement for the quantum chemistry summer school in Istanbul, I 

couldn’t resist. I was probably not actually at a lecture on quantum chemistry, but I was still exploring new places. 

 

#6 

 

I had forgotten that my mother had come to visit me for a week or so in New York before going on to the Democratic convention. I had never taken the time to 

bond with her, and I didn’t want to drink with her. 

 

#7 

 

I had lost my way as a student and a daughter, and I didn’t have a quest anymore. I had a job, and what it was all leading to was a lifetime of jobs. 

 

#8 

 

I knew that my father was going to die soon after the Thanksgiving when he went home to his parents for the holiday without inviting me or even giving me an 

excuse like family insanity. He may have been disfigured in the accident, or having depression, or both. 

 

#9 

 

My father, who had been a truck driver, survived the accident but was left with no mobility and no interest in life. He was left with only boredom to cope with. I 

realized that the world can be too stale to generate new situations, and that is when you are left with reruns of what you’ve already experienced. 

 

#10 

 

I began to dissociate, hoping that the pastel smoothness of the L. A. suburbs could get me there. But no luck. That does not happen easily. It happens or it 

doesn’t; you cannot force it.

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10

Insights from Chapter 10 

 

#1 

 

In about 1965, I began to pay attention to news. I didn’t have a television or radio, and I didn’t read any print news except for the headlines I occasionally 

scanned at newsstands. I didn’t have a shared now with other people. 

 

#2 

 

I saw Jack, pale, large-eared, and good-natured, lifted out of the lab and crouching in a jungle, dodging fire from invisible enemies of his government. I did not 

have a secure notion of where Vietnam was, other than across the Pacific, but now I could imagine a chain connecting us to this little-known place. 

 

#3 

 

I had to go from lab to lab, signing people up to my letter, and collecting signatures. I eventually formed a committee and began to plot our next steps. 

 

#4 

 

I had begun to lose the protective armor of solipsism, and as a result, I began to hear the sounds of boots against flesh and the groans of pain that were once 

only audible to me. 

 

#5 

 

I was able to sense the power of people acting and speaking together, and I was excited to be a part of it. I didn’t get nicer, I just began to understand the power 

of sociality and solidarity. 

 

#6 

 

We used parties as a means of organizing, because we weren’t just trying to end the war, we were also trying to start a new and freer and more generous way of 

life. We had to become warriors ourselves. 

 

#7 

 

My problems with my father were the source of my problem with authority. Edelman said that I was dependent on him, and that if I didn’t shape up, my career 

would be over. 

 

#8 

 

The threat wasn’t empty, just uninteresting. I’d been in Rockefeller’s atmosphere of boiling ambition long enough to see what was actually meant by a career. It 

was a wind-up toy, a little drummer in uniform, marching ahead, leading you on, and making announcements like Nobel-worthy research on gamma globulin. 

 

#9 

 

I had always been anti-authoritarian, and my father had passed that down to me. I had left Edelman’s office, and walking became my main activity for the next 

decade. I marched with thousands of other antiwar students in the spring of 1966, and later with women who had been selected for sacrifice. 

 

#10 

 

I became a parent and a breadwinner in the early seventies, which meant I was completely embedded in the affairs of my species. I was a committed socialist 

and feminist, and I helped build up a coherent world from the scraps of data that present themselves. 

 

#11 

 

I was a political activist and responsible human being, and I did not want to be distracted by my perceptual wanderings, which I believed were a distraction 

from my mission. I was convinced that my new life-among-people was a dodge and betrayal of the earlier mission. 

 

#12 

 

I understood that by stepping out into the world of other people, I had betrayed my child-self. But a few seconds later, I was accusing this younger self of drag- 

ging me down with her solipsistic madness. I knew what I had to do.

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11

Insights from Chapter 11 

 

#1 

 

I was a soldier for the left, but the movement was crumbling beneath me. I was spending more and more time working on feminist issues, but the meetings 

were becoming more and more irrelevant. I was depressed because my father was dying or already dead, depending on how you look at things. 

 

#2 

 

I had been married to my second husband, who was the love of my life, for nearly ten years when I began to experience depression. I had been diagnosed with 

depression, and I went along with the diagnosis and therapy. 

 

#3 

 

I had always been an atheist, and I had published an essay-length history of American atheism that unearthed the stream of working-class atheism from which I 

was descended. I had always believed that there was no God, and that morality originated in atheism and the realization that no higher power was coming along to 

feed the hungry or lift the fallen. 

 

#4 

 

I was an activist, and I was constantly challenging people’s beliefs. I was intolerant of others’ beliefs, and I was sure that none of their beliefs were true. I hated 

all the misery that God allowed or instigated. 

 

#5 

 

I had been diagnosed with depression, and I had spent years clinging to a piece of flotsam or wreckage. Then I was rescued by a passing lifeboat packed with 

people who gave me food and water. But just as I was rejoicing in the human company, I began to notice something not quite right about my new community. 

 

#6 

 

I began my study of war and human violence with what I thought was a manageable hypothesis, based on many months of reading. But then I came across the 

book The Hunters or the Hunted. , which explained that humans were the prey of more skilled and better armed nonhuman predators. 

 

#7 

 

I began to think of animals as conscious, autonomous beings. I had never spent much time thinking of animals in any context, whether as pets or as objects of 

pity. But as I got into my late forties and fifties, improving finances made it possible for me to go on vacation in rural and fauna-rich locations. 

 

#8 

 

I became interested in the group behavior of ibises in Florida. They flock to a nearby mangrove island to roost for the night, and at sunrise they take off again 

for their feeding grounds. But the morning liftoff can occur before or at sunrise, and it can be either messy and anarchic or a single, coordinated action. 

 

#9 

 

Theism is not only monotheism, or the particular version of it represented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in which the one God is not only singular but 

perfect. The God of monotheism is a projection based on the child’s perception of reliably nurturing and powerful parents. 

 

#10 

 

The rise of monotheism, and the dead world of Newton’s physics that came with it, paved the way for Descartes and the dead world of modern day science. 

 

#11 

 

I had denied or repressed what I had seen in the mountains and desert as unverifiable and possibly psychotic. But thanks to my years of research into history, 

prehistory, and theology, I was intellectually prepared to acknowledge the possible existence of conscious beings that normally elude our senses.

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12

Insights from Chapter 12 

 

#1 

 

The category of mystical experience is widespread in America. It is difficult to find words to describe such experiences, and they are often attributed to mental 

illness or opportunism. 

 

#2 

 

The most useful work on mystical states is the psychologist William James’s chapter on Mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which was pub- 

lished in 1902. It features a dozen personal accounts of cosmic consciousness, the ineffable, and even a consuming fire. 

 

#3 

 

I had a midlife crisis and moved to the Keys. I fell in love with a local and decided to settle down. I had the house cleaned out and painted, and moved in with a 

pile of used furniture from a store in Key West. 

 

#4 

 

I began to see the ocean as a sort of Presence that gathered itself together out of all the bits and pieces that it collected - the birds and cloudscapes and glit- 

tering Milky Way. It was not benevolent, but it was uplifting. 

 

#5 

 

The cognitive scientists argue that our brains are afflicted with a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device that predisposes us to imagine gods, faces in clouds, 

and divine beings in rocks. But there were also lions in the night, bears in the forest, and snakes in the grass. 

 

#6 

 

The Other that appears in mystical experiences is often described as being alive, or living God. But is the Other alive in any biological sense. Does it eat or 

metabolize. Does it reproduce. 

 

#7 

 

The Other in mystical experiences is not benevolent. It is more like a consuming fire that is gravely disturbing to those who recognize nothing divine about it 

but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy. 

 

#8 

 

The Other as perceived by mystics is not benevolent, and neither is it necessarily malevolent. It is simply another form of life that has its own agenda, which is 

sometimes working towards us and sometimes against us. 

 

#9 

 

Science fiction has long speculated about the existence of an über-being that feeds off of human consciousness. We are not talking about God, but rather 

about a being that is not visible to us, and that roams the universe searching for minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact them. 

 

#10 

 

The idea that there is some supernatural being that is separate from, and superior to, humans is not realistic. The fact that this being is so far undetectable to 

us and our instruments does not mean that it is made out of some supernatural mind-stuff unlike familiar matter and energy. 

 

#11 

 

The worst possible relationship between humans and some mystically potent being or beings would be not symbiosis but parasitism. Parasites modify the 

behavior and possibly the thoughts and feelings of their hosts. I do not believe in the existence of vampire-spirit-creatures capable of digging deep into our limbic 

systems while simultaneously messing with our cognitive faculties, but experience requires me to keep an open mind. 

 

#12 

 

The modern scientific worldview is one in which there exists no consciousness or agency other than our own. Nonhuman animals are dumb mechanisms driv- 

en by instinct, and all other deities and spirits have been eliminated in favor of the unapproachable God of monotheism. 

 

#13 

 

I was not prepared to let go of my younger self, so I saved my journal from permanent incarceration in a library basement. When I traveled down to survey the 

damage after Hurricane Wilma, I discovered that most of the evidence of my existence had been swept away. 

 

#14 

 

We must ask why, because asking why is asking for a motive or a purpose, and a motive requires a mind. The universe does not have motives or desires, but it 

does contain uncountable algorithms that act out of what almost seems to be an unquenchable playfulness. 

 

End of Insights. Thank you for reading.

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