The Marble Room: How I Lost God and Found Myself in Africa - Softcover

This question is at the root of how an increasingly self-aware humanity will struggle to define itself in the 21st century. William Hatcher's memoir, The Marble Room, explores this question by taking readers on an archetypal adventure of self-discovery.

The author grew up in a racist, religiously supremacist milieu in rural America. Life was safe and predictable until his parents divorced when he was a young teen. Attempting to rewrite the end of his parents' marriage and salvage his worldview, he married an evangelical woman, but that, too, ended in divorce.

Desperate to redefine truth, he left home to serve in the Peace Corps, teaching geography at an all-girls' boarding school in Tanzania. His Bible Belt racism and religious beliefs crumbled as the challenges he faced escalated; glimpsing death on holy peaks, meeting "ancestor spirits" in sacred caves, and receiving the "leopard's blessing" from elder shamans. One of his Muslim students became a close friend and confidante, and she encouraged him to consider God in different ways. Near the end of the story he finds peace in Pantheism, though an unexpected tragedy puts his new spirituality to a final test.

A year later, Hatcher finds himself in Tanzania, East Africa. As a geography teacher at an all-girls' boarding school, he's expected broaden his students' horizons, but instead it is his own worldview that is challenged by encounters with local shamans; dangerous ascents on Mounts Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and Meru; and especially a friendship with a Muslim student. Through tragedy and triumph, by questioning the very core of his being, he manages to escape the confines of his "marble room" and gain a new understanding of himself and God.

Filled with breathtaking accounts of death-defying mountain climbs and the spectacular beauty of the African countryside, this memoir is both a tale of adventure and self-discovery and proof that even the most naive and insular American can achieve a spiritual awakening.