Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope.
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 until, accidentally, she stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself.
And it was only when she applied the tools of critical thinking to this exploration of her past that she uncovered a very different kind of story.
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.
