Learning to Think

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 contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but also shadowed by debt and her father’s alcoholism. When her father was killed by teenagers on the streets of their public housing project, her family developed a deep and dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which they belonged, and Tracy stopped attending school. Over the years, in a bid to balm her grief and poverty, she journeyed through multiple belief systems, from extreme religion to the occult and paranormal, and eventually conspiracy theories. Amid this chaos, on the shelves of a Birmingham bookshop, she discovered an old copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, the book that taught her how to, finally, think critically—and for herself. Eloquently written and brimming with surprisingly sharp humor, Learning to Think is a battle cry for imaginative freedom and taking charge of one’s own education.

About the Author: Tracy King is a writer, producer, and science communicator based in England. She contributes to media on subjects ranging from science and technology to politics and videogames, in outlets such as the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, and New European.