About the Book
From Jason Gots, creator of the podcasts Think Again and Clever Creature, comes a philosophical love letter to the slow, difficult work of building a life and living with your dreams in the face of reality.
You could say this book is about a series of experiments--some impulsive and foolish, others grandiose, and still others that strive for honesty, humility, and timing to yield some promising results. Experiments in connection with self and others in spite of the enormous gulf that yawns between your subjective experience and mine and all that is lost in translation when we try to find the middle ground.
Humanity is Trying is itself an experiment in resurrecting two people--a sister and a best friend--from beneath the sad stories of their deaths. Because we are not our stories, not reducible to that, however compelling they may be.
Driven by the losses of his best friend, John, and sister, Meri, Jason Gots looks back on their lives and his own, how they shaped each other in life and how their deaths drove him as an artist, musicians and creator of the podcasts Clever Creature and Think Again.
About the Author :
Jason Gots is a writer and podcaster by way of theater, theology, literature, education, developmental psychology, songwriting, online media, and a couple years spent wandering in more than one desert. It's a long story. He produces and hosts the experimental variety podcast Clever Creature. From 2015 to 2020 he produced Think Again-- a Big Think Podcast. Jason currently teaches narrative podcasting in Columbia University's graduate writing program and lives in Astoria, New York, with two people and multiple animals he wouldn't want to live without.
Jason Gots is a writer and podcaster by way of theater, theology, literature, education, developmental psychology, songwriting, online media, and a couple years spent wandering in more than one desert. It's a long story. He produces and hosts the experimental variety podcast Clever Creature. From 2015 to 2020 he produced Think Again-- a Big Think Podcast. Jason currently teaches narrative podcasting in Columbia University's graduate writing program and lives in Astoria, New York, with two people and multiple animals he wouldn't want to live without.
Review :
One part great grief, one part intellectual autobiography, one part spiritual growth, Humanity Is Trying is that best of written strivings: a book the author had to write. Gots brings every ounce of his being to every page, with results that are riveting, edifying, and true.
-- "Gish Jen, author of The Resisters"
Humanity Is Trying is a curio--an intensely personal memoir shot through with hard-won wisdom (creative, sociopolitical, spiritual) offered in a spirit of complete wonder and humility. A few pages in I asked, 'Who is the audience for this book?' A few pages later I declared, 'The audience is me.' I lost count of the number of times I felt a thrill of recognition in its pages. I was lucky to be interviewed by Jason for a podcast during a highly stressful era of my creative life. Afterward I said to a friend: 'I felt weirdly disarmed and seen by him.' I felt it again reading Jason's wonderful book: disarmed and seen.
-- "Anaïs Mitchell, writer of Hadestown"
A truly beautiful, wise, raw, subtle book. It glides effortlessly from thoughts about a moment in the author's childhood to vast cosmic questions, and back again. There are many, many dog-eared pages in my copy; moments I wanted to remember and go back to. Like a good memoir, it lets us live Jason's life with him, but does much more than that too; to adapt a phrase of George Eliot's, it 'expands the range the soul has to swim in.'
-- "Robert MacFarlane, author of Underland"
A truly beautiful, wise, raw, subtle book.
-- "Robert MacFarlane, author of Underland"
I read this book in a single sitting and found it in many ways remarkable. It is a book that puts love right at the heart of religion, without any sentimentality. Gots' relationship with his sister Meri and his friend John, I felt, were his route to the divine and to kenosis, the emptying of self. Instead of seeking salvation through belief in obscure doctrines and the quest for personal salvation, Gots found what we call the sacred in two remarkable but deeply human beings. In achieving this, I feel he grasped the essence of religious life.
-- "Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God"
Jason Gots offers us an intimate look into his life with all the varied roads travelled to self-discovery. Humanity Is Trying is a touching memoir woven through with stories of awkward early love, family relationships, deep abiding friendship and the pain when people are lost along the way.
-- "Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness"
