Transcendent Kingdom

Transcendent Kingdom is the story of Gifty and her family. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience. Her parents immigrated to the US South from Ghana after Gifty's older brother, Nana, was born. Gifty tells us the story of her family's struggles with life in the American South as people of color, especially the story of her brother's death from addiction and her mother's subsequent difficulties with depression, and she shares her path to study ways to combat addiction through neuroscience as well as her spiritual path.

This is a rich, rich story. The characters and their accomplishments and their struggles felt completely genuine to me. I was astonished to learn that the author does not have a degree in neuroscience; even the neuroscience sounded completely plausible. It's one of those stories that would be a great book for discussion.

A few quotes:

“...Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infine, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.”

‘Mrs. Pasternack, my biology teacher, was a Christian. Everyone I knew in Alabama was, but she said things like, “I think we're made out of stardust, and God made the stars.”‘

“For years I hadn't been able to reconcile wanting to feel good with wanting to be good, two things that often seemed at odds....”

“I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don't want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know it's easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure that everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give into the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It's just that I'm standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It's true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.”