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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

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. —ANAIS MITCHELL, creator of HADESTOWN: The Musical

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

It is a book that puts love right at the heart of religion, without any sentimentality…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