Living With a Wild God | Granta

  • Published: 01/05/2014
  • ISBN: 9781847087393
  • Granta Books
  • 272 pages

Living With a Wild God

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is an acclaimed social critic on both sides of the Atlantic, renowned for her trenchant, witty polemics, her pieces of journalism, and her trademark intelligence. She writes with unparalleled precision, insight and a rationalist’s unwavering gaze.

But in middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it. It was the kind of event that people call a ‘mystical experience’ – and to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, was nothing less than shattering.

In Living with a Wild God, Ehrenreich vividly explores her life-long quest to find ‘the truth’ about the universe and everything else, in an attempt to reconcile this cataclysmic, defining moment with her secular understanding of the world. The result is a profound reflection on science, religion and the human condition, and a personal insight into the inner life of one of our finest thinkers. It is a book that challenges us all to reassess our perceptions of the world and what it means to be alive.

Ehrenreich writes like a dream... [She] has produced a minor miracle: a book about moments of transcendence that many have experienced but most have privately filed away

Peter Stanford, Daily Telegraph ****

Ehrenreich is such an exhilarating writer... Intelligent and thoughtful, [this] is a brave and fascinating reply to her teenage self. A fascinating spiritual odyssey, rigorously honest and deeply moving

Christopher Hart, Sunday Times

The poet Robert Browning warned us that just when we are safest a friend's death or a sudden line of verse can start old questions reeling in our minds again. Be warned: this book will have the same effect, so don't read it if you don't want all your safe conclusions about the meaning of life shaken and stirred

Richard Holloway

The Author

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fifteen books, including the bestselling Smile or Die and Nickel and Dimed. She has written for Time, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine and various British newspapers including The Times and the Guardian. She lives in Virginia, USA.

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Typing Practice

Barbara Ehrenreich

‘I didn’t start my journal with the idea of recording my progress toward the ultimate truth.’