Book Description

"The Soul Grows in Darkness" recounts a profoundly challenging life. Born nearly deaf, Loren lives in a rat-infested Chicago ghetto where he contends with poverty, family conflict, prejudice, drugs, and terrifying violence. Barely surviving this murky urban landscape, his struggles initiate a lifelong search for God and truth. Answers to his insatiable curiosity about life, death, and war are rare, but mysterious dreams and inner dialogues pose probing questions that guide his journey. He wonders whether his memories and dreams are only illusory. In adulthood, he turns to psychoanalysis to redeem his dark past and find meaning in his dreams. As a result, he becomes an analyst himself. Are memories, dreams, and the promptings of the unconscious only opiates of minds desperately coping with a hopelessly disordered world? Or, however unreliable, do they contain one's truth? "The Soul Grows in Darkness" is a hopeful and poignant search for self-understanding, love, and God. Its conclusion is astonishing. "Poignant, funny, tragic, and uplifting, Loren Pedersen's new book will be many things to many readers: compelling true-life story, inspirational and cautionary tale, psychological self-help manual, and a chronicle of the second half of the tumultuous twentieth century. Readers will be immensely entertained by the vivid story here of Dr. Pedersen's life, through which they will discover illumination of their own." Mark Spencer Author of the novels "Love and Reruns in Adams County" and "The Weary Motel." Winner of The Faulkner Society Faulkner Award for Fiction, and of the Omaha Prize for the Novel