The short version: This book started out good. Then it got boring. Then it got irritatingly tedious. Then it got offensively bad. True fact: It's impossible to read while simultaneously rolling one's eyes, smacking the book in question on the nearest hard surface, and yelling, "Oh, come ON!" I was doing all of those things on a regular basis by the time I hit the halfway mark. That's why this book took me so long to finish, and why I'm going to have to pay a library fine on a book I hate. Which

I read a couple of other books by Barbara so I know she can be an informative and entertaining writer. The blurbs for this book read something like "Adolescent girl has mystical experience; in adulthood she examines possible explanations and the nature of God (if any)." Well, since most intelligent people engage in similar quests I was looking forward to hers. What I got was an autobiography. It took well over 1/3 of the book to get to the mystical experience, and frankly, it did not strike me a...

65 pages in and I'm just not connecting with it. I think it has to do more with how the book is written than the subject matter itself. Or the fact that my library ended up with the large-print version and the words just scream at me from the page. I can't hold it far enough away to feel comfortable, and for some reason I can't focus. I might try it again someday, but I suspect I don't care enough about her philosophical perspective. I wanted more of the journal and her spiritual experiences and...

This is a challenging book. Enrenreich carries the reader along on her journey as she tries to reconcile a mystical experience in her adolescence with her lack of faith. I respect, immensely, her decision to write a weird book about a deeply personal experience that she likely knew would not satisfy anyone looking for the popular memoir story-arc. At the same time, I found myself impatient with her assumption that her experience was either inexplicable or unusual. She chose, based on her own upb...

I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads program.I am familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich as a social commentator and have read some of her essays and one or two of her books. I was attracted to the premise of this book: prompted by coming across a journal she kept as a teenager, a lifelong atheist looks back and tries to reconstruct and analyze her adolescent search for “the Truth.”Ehrenreich grew up in a horribly dysfunctional family in which both parents

I was tremendously excited when I heard Barbara Ehrenreich was writing a book about spirituality. After all, this is the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bright-Sided (aka Smile or Die), two classic works of journalistic enquiry. I couldn’t wait to see what this confirmed atheist would make of mystical experiences. However, having wrestled with the book for over five months, often only managing to read a few pages at a time, I find myself disappointed.What has Ehrenreich written here? She refu...

The Road to Damascus on US hwy. 395 in Central CaliforniaBarbara Ehrenreich lives in her head. So do I. I, and I think she, can’t imagine any other mode of living. We share, if that’s not too oxymoronic an idea, a solipsistic attitude toward the world in general - that it really is dependent upon my thinking it into existence. We both know that this is irrational and a social handicap. But the attitude is not a matter of choice. Through some combination of nature and nurture, it is our fate to l...

Call this book review "The deep loneliness of Barbara Ehrenreich" or maybe "The Tragedy of Barbara Ehrenreich."I wrestled with exactly how to rate this book. Her alleged metaphysical experience as a teen, and her return to it at late-midlife crisis time? That part's a 1-star, and I knew that when I had read an excerpt online. She even admits that, as William James notes, the physical "symptoms" she had of her mystical experience are not uncommon. Yet, she wants to mystify them, rather than notin...

This is a book I should have connected with. Barbara Ehrenreich and I both attended the same small college (Reed) in the 1960's and later connected with nature in an almost religious way in spite of or maybe because we are atheists. For me the book got better in the last 1/3, but it was hard to get there. If this had not been a goodreads win that I felt obligated to review, I would have given up early on. Ms. Ehrenreich is obviously one smart cookie if she earned a degree in chemical physics fro...

While looking through the remains of her hurricane-flooded house in the Florida keys, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered a journal that she wrote as a teenager. Her journal forms the foundation of this book. Growing up, she remembers her family was often dysfunctional. Her mother was rather mean-hearted, and her father was a genius, but also an alcoholic. It is obvious that Ehrenreich is also a genius, and as a child she was precocious. Growing up, she often engaged in solipsism--the idea that her mi...

I love Barbara Ehrenreich, and was lucky enough to have her as a professor in journalism school. This book, unfortunately, wasn't what I expected. I learned more about her upbringing but the "mystical experience" she takes forever to lead up to was disappointing in its scope. Between that and all the philosophizing, I just skimmed most of the book. Sorry, Barbara!

What does a 70-something journalist, advocate for social justice, and life-long atheist trained in science make of the long series of spiritual-feeling dissociative experiences she’s had off and on since she was a teenager? Barbara Ehrenreich, author Nickel and Dimed, turns her unflinching, unsentimental powers of investigation on herself this time and the result is largely fascinating. She originally expected to write a history of religion, but at the advice of her agent that plan morphed. Ehre...

An old atheist goes soft. I have heard in fact that this is quite common, believers when they near death come to doubt their belief and atheists start to hope they were all wrong. My first time to read Barbara Ehrenreich and what a mind! Brilliant! Also, original. I practically inhaled this book. I was afraid, nearing the end, that she was going to lose the thread of what she had started, but she did not let me down. Really, I should have known that with such a keen mind, she would bring her arg...

I'm not sure if this type of book could really have spoilers, but I am going to say a great deal about what's in this book. If you don't want to see it...then read the book and come back and read my review.Barbara Ehrenreich was born and raised atheist in a fairly dysfunctional household. Her parents were intelligent, but also alcoholic and they moved regularly which caused problems with Barbara's education and socialization.Barbara didn't see other people as intelligent and in possession of a m...

This book is definitely not for what I usually sit down to read Barbara Ehrenreich. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it did take me a little while to adapt to what was not a story both personal and researched, relating her experiences to wider domains of thought and study. There's certainly work out there on mystical experiences and the like, but she is not drawing it in and weaving it with her story. This is as close to a straight-up memoir as I've ever seen from her.Note: The rest of th...

I was quite disappointed by this. It was rather self-indulgent and aggrandazing and, well, it totally lacked the self-reflection I would expect from an intelligent woman in the second half of her life.Especially there was almost no reference to the wealth of knowledge to be found in modern neuroscience and general psychology regarding the brain basis of religious beliefs and transcendental experiences - and that seemed incongruous for a proclaimed scientist.

Premise: This book is a memoir about Barbara Ehrenreich, a athiest and scientist who is striving to answer some very difficult life questions that all of us have. The content in this book is often quite hard to get through if you are not into (or knowledgeable) about science. Barbara talks a lot about very complex scientific things. If you love chemistry though, you will probably have fun reading it. Me personally, I'm not a scientist so I often found myself getting bored and very confused. I di...

I had a lot of “aha” moments with this personal exploration of spirituality by a life-long atheist and scientist turned journalist. As a teenager she had some “mystical” experiences which challenged her highly rationale world view at the time. Going back to revisit the import of those experiences made for a fascinating journey of self-discovery. This is not a heavy philosophical exploration of ideas, but more of a brutally honest autobiographical account of how a person growing up in the 50’s an...

I received this via a Goodreads giveaway - I am so glad I won this title!I've loved reading Barbara Ehrenreich ever since coming across "Nickel & Dimed" when I worked in a bookstore.This book, "Living with a Wild God", is a beautifully written memoir detailing her quest for meaning throughout her life. Prompted by finding journals she'd written as an adolescent, Barbara explores where her spiritual journey took her and where she is now. Coming from someone who was trained as a scientist, is a jo...

Thanks to Goodreads and Twelve Books for the review copy. Nothing in me wants to review this book because I don't want to get into a discussion about its contents. The truth is, there's stuff in here to upset atheists and believers alike, and I just don't want to get in that discussion on Goodreads. Perhaps I'll change my mind later, but I doubt it. That said, this is extremely well-written by one of the smartest minds I've encountered in a book. Ehrenreich is beyond intelligent. Her mind may le...