Learning to Think: A Memoir of Faith, Superstition, and the Courage to Ask Questions

Set in 1980s Birmingham, England, a piercing memoir about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictionsher family was happy and creative, yet shadowed by debt, phobias, her fathers alcoholism, and the illusory promises of a born-again Christian church. The uneasy balance of the King household was irrevocably upended on a rainy spring night in 1988, when her father was killed by teenagers just blocks from their public housing estate.Her mothers dysfunctional reliance on the church deepened following the tragedy, and King, suffering from undiagnosed anxiety, stopped attending school. The account of her fathers death remained hazy, made worse by the fact that four of the accused teenagersneighborhood boys she could not avoidwere never charged. What could have triggered such an act of aggression? Clinging to hearsay and what little information she had from the police, King allowed her imagination to fill in the rest.Over the years, in a bid to balm her grief and gaps in formal education, King journeyed through multiple belief systems: she distanced herself from fundamentalism, searching for clarity instead in the occult, paranormal beliefs, and conspiracy theories. Amid the chaos of her coming of age, she stumbled upon a copy of Carl Sagans The Demon-Haunted World on the shelves of a Birmingham bookshop a discovery that proved transformative. Sagans sage caveat, But I could be wrong, became Kings guiding light, empowering her to confront her demons.An eloquently written and often sharply funny account that is ever sensitive to the fallibility of memory and the nuances of truth, Learning to Think is a resounding battle cry for the value of education and the freedom to think critically, imaginatively, and for oneself.