Learning to Think.

byTracy King, Tracy King (Read by)

A memoir about hardship, education, hellfire, family, finding a way to break free

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Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, a way to reconcile the unfairness of the universe. How else can you explain why some families have everything and some have nothing?

Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but it was marked by debt, by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia. When her father died at the hands of a local teenage gang on the streets of their Midlands council estate, superstition gave way to a deeper and more dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which Tracy and her family belonged. In the chaos of loss, the paranormal became paranoia.

In a bid to find definitive answers, Tracy followed one belief system after another. After accepting then rejecting spiritualism, witchcraft, and eventually conspiracy theories, she accidentally stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to a world of critical thinking, scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself.

Learning to Think is a memoir about belief. It's about poverty, religion and superstition, grief and healing. But most of all, it's about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.

An astonishing account of a father’s violent death, exorcism and religious superstition….
Learning to Think is, in many ways, a book about demons: the addiction, violence, mental health struggles and, yes, superstition, that so often accompany poverty. But it’s also the story of an extraordinary family, full of energy and joie de vivre. It’s a story that brims with life and hard-won hope… Well structured and punchily told.

Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

About Tracy King

Tracy King is a writer, producer and science communicator based in England. She has contributed to media on subjects ranging from science and technology to politics and video games, for the BBC and in the Guardian, Telegraph, the New Statesman, Stylist and the New European, amongst others. She was a columnist for Custom PC magazine for over ten years. Her science and critical-thinking animations include a collaboration with Tim Minchin, Storm, which has over five million views on YouTube and was adapted into a bestselling graphic novel. Her television and radio credits include Sky News, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain and BBC Sounds. She is writer in residence at the Royal Institution, one of Britain's oldest scientific organizations.
Details
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • ISBN: 9781473585041
  • Length: 502 minutes
  • Price: £14.00
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