The Nobel Prize winner reflects on living “in a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures.” In this perceptive collection of essays, Doris Lessing considers the savage past of our species and the remnants of it that seem to regularly erupt in our supposedly advanced and civilized world. Ultimately, she directly addresses the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what we know, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, and how to look at our society and ourselves with fresh eyes. “It’s a sobering book, but Lessing is hopeful—and her main source of hope stems from the capacity of human beings to study themselves and learn from their own behavior.” —The New York Times  “Pithy, tough-minded, optimistic.” —New Society “One of the most important writers of the past hundred years.” —The Times (London)