Living with a Wild God (Ehrenreich)

Living with a Wild God:  A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Barbara Ehrenreich, 2014
Grand Central Publishing
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455501762


Summary
In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny-or as she later learned to call them, "mystical"-experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search.

Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, Living with a Wild God brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life."

Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 26, 1941
• Where—Butte, Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., Reed College; Ph.D., Rockefeller University
• Currently—lives in Alexandria, Virginia


Barbara Ehrenreich an American author best known for Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). She is also the author of Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005), This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (2008), Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything (2014) and numerous other books. A frequent contributer to Time, Harper's, Esquire, The New Republic, Mirabella, Nation, and New York Times Magazine, she lives near Key West, Florida.

More
Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Alexander. Her father was a copper miner who went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University and who eventually became an executive at the Gillette Corporation. Ehrenreich studied physics at Reed College, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she received a Ph.D in cellular biology from Rockefeller University.

Citing her interest in social change, she opted for political activism instead of pursuing a scientific career. She met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City.

In 1970, her first child, Rosa (now Rosa Brooks), was born. Her second child, Benjamin, was born in 1972. Barbara and John divorced and in 1983 she married Gary Stevenson, a warehouse employee who later became a union organizer. She divorced Stevenson in the early 1990s.

From 1991 to 1997, Ehrenreich was a regular columnist for Time magazine. Currently, she contributes regularly to The Progressive and has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications.

In 1998, the American Humanist Association named her the Humanist of the Year.

In 1998 and 2000, she taught essay writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2004, Ehrenreich wrote a month-long guest column for the New York Times while regular columnist Thomas Friedman was on leave and she was invited to stay on as a columnist. She declined, saying that she preferred to spend her time more on long-term activities, such as book-writing.

Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the release of her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In her article "Welcome to Cancerland," published in the November 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine, she describes her breast cancer experience and debates the medical industry's problems with the issue of breast cancer.

In 2006, Ehrenreich founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers—people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control."

Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors and The Nation's Editorial Board. ("More" from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Using her [girlhood] journal extracts as a point of departure, Ehrenreich returns with vigor to her youthful quest, enlisting all of her subsequent scientific training to find an explanation for what had occurred to her as a girl, yet offering only a glimmer in her wise and tolerant later years of a possibility of a “living, breathing Other.”
Publishers Weekly


The New York Times best-selling author of Nickeled and Dimed, Ehrenreich set out to reconstruct an adolescent quest detailed in an old journal she discovered. Her youthful goal of understanding the truth of the universe—ambitious plan—took her through the study of science and several heightened experiences that now seem mystical. There's much for the adult Ehrenreich, an atheist and rationalist, to ponder.
Library Journal


In 1959, the 16-year-old author had an ineffable vision, which she here contextualizes and attempts to understand. Ehrenreich returns with a personal chronicle, a coming-of-age story with an edge and a focus: Who am I? ... A powerful, honest account of a lifelong attempt to understand that will please neither theists nor atheists.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
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