Why am I passionate about this?

Born in Baghdad and raised in America, I come from an ancient lineage of people called the Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians who still speak Aramaic). The first book I read was Gone with the Wind, at age nine, in Arabic. We lived in Jordan at the time, awaiting a visa to the United States and Scarlett O’Hara’s land and people were my impressions of what America would look like. But Michigan in the 1980s was not Georgia in the 1860s. Still, that book proved that great storytelling transcends ethnicity, age, and gender. So in my writing and film career, I have focused on the art of storytelling as I share the stories my people, culture, and heritage. 


I wrote

Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World: My Life-Changing Journey Through a Shamanic School

By Weam Namou,

Book cover of Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World: My Life-Changing Journey Through a Shamanic School

What is my book about?

This memoir is about one woman’s quest to find her literary voice. She one day calls bestselling author Lynn V.…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Medicine Woman

Weam Namou Why did I love this book?

Native Americans have played a strong role in my life over the decades, especially as teachers of wisdom.

Reading Medicine Woman for the first time, I immediately connected with Lynn’s Native American teachers, Agnes and Ruby and learned a great deal through her journey to find her inner power. Her teachers brought forth ancient knowledge by way of the sacred feminine which felt familiar to my heart and soul, familiar to my indigenous people, the Chaldeans, Neo-Babylonians who still speak Aramaic.

Each time I re-read this book, I find something new that speaks to me. 

By Lynn V. Andrews,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Medicine Woman as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Lynn V. Andrews takes the reader with her as she goes on inward journeys with the help of the Sisterhood of the Shields, and relates the stories of others.

Join her as she is initiated into the Sisterhood and creates her own shield, which will show her the nature of her spiritual path (Spirit Woman). Follow her to the Yucatan, where the medicine wheel leads her, and she is faced with the terrifying reality of the butterfly tree (Jaguar Woman). Enter the Dreamtime with her, where she emerges in medieval England as Catherine, and encounters the Grandmother, who offers to…


Book cover of Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master

Weam Namou Why did I love this book?

I love biographies of the lives of individuals who go through spiritual transformations.

Daughter of Fire is one of those books. It’s about a British woman who goes to India and meets a Sufi Master. He asks her to keep a diary, which she does for five years. The account of the guru/disciple relationship is deep, touching, and intriguing.

It keeps you turning the pages through the 800+ pages of a soulful experience. 

By Irina Tweedie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Daughter of Fire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This diary spans five years, making up an amazing record of spiritual transformation: the agonies, the resistance, the long and frightening bouts with the purifying forces of Kundalini, the perseverance, the movements towards surrender, the longing, and finally, the all-consuming love.


Book cover of Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1

Weam Namou Why did I love this book?

In this book, author Neale Donald Walsch, at the lowest point of his life, picks up pen and paper one night and begins an interesting and quite intimate conversation with God.

The conversation becomes a daily routine and helps him get past his fears and challenges. Walsch asks questions I think many people, including myself, want to ask God, and God (the author’s higher consciousness) provides answers that really make you think and look at things through a different perspective.

This conversation ends up changing Walsh’s life, as well as the reader’s. 

By Neale Donald Walsch,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Conversations with God as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Conversations with God Book 1 began a series that has been changing millions of lives for more than ten years. Finally, the bestselling series is now a movie, starring Henry Czerny (The Pink Panther and Clear and Present Danger) and Ingrid Boulting (The Last Tycoon). Produced and directed by Stephen Simon (producer of Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come) and distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Fox Home Entertainment, the theatrical release is set for October 27, 2006. The movie is the true account of Walsch (played by Cierny), who went from an unemployed homeless man to an…


Book cover of Ishmael

Weam Namou Why did I love this book?

"Man lived harmlessly on this planet for some three million years but the Takers have brought the whole thing to the point of collapse in only five hundred generations."

This award-winning book Ishmael is a thought-provoking book, with particularly interesting quotes about tribalism and the Chaldeans from ancient Mesopotamia, my ancestry. There are two characters; the teacher Ishmael (a telepathic Gorilla), and a nameless student who is seeking to save the world. Ishmael classifies humanity into two groups, the “Leavers” and “Takers.”

The first are hunter-gatherers and the latter are civilized agriculturists. Even if the reader doesn’t agree with some of its philosophical views, the novel gives us many moments to pause and reflect.  

By Daniel Quinn,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Ishmael as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author.

“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New York Times Book Review

Teacher Seeks Pupil.
Must have an earnest desire to save the world.
Apply in person.

It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of…


Book cover of When God Was a Woman

Weam Namou Why did I love this book?

Reading that once upon a time in my birthland, male dominance was not the natural order of things was liberating.

In this historical book that’s based on critical facts, one learns of the true nature of women as Goddess in the Middle East. She held prestigious positions and had a fairly peaceful lifestyle until religion and patriarchy changed all that.

Over the centuries, her stories were deleted out of history and also distorted in an attempt to strip her of her power. An attempt that has caused a hell on earth in that region.

By Merlin Stone,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked When God Was a Woman as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The landmark exploration of the ancient worship of the Great Goddess and the eventual supression of women's rites.

In the beginning, God was a woman...

How did the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy come about? In fascinating detail, Merlin Stone tells us the story of the Goddess who reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East. Under her reign, societal roles differed markedly from those in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures: women bought and sold property, traded in the marketplace, and inherited title and land from their mothers. Documenting the wholesale rewriting of myth and religious dogmas, Merlin Stone describes an ancient…


Explore my book 😀

Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World: My Life-Changing Journey Through a Shamanic School

By Weam Namou,

Book cover of Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World: My Life-Changing Journey Through a Shamanic School

What is my book about?

This memoir is about one woman’s quest to find her literary voice. She one day calls bestselling author Lynn V. Andrews for some literary advice, a call that leads to four years of training in Lynn’s mysticism school. Through this school, author Weam Namou faces her innermost fears and heals her deepest wounds in order to be reborn into a state of new potential. Her story reveals how to track the events in your life that lead you to your individual truth. As you take her journey through Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World, you see yourself in each page and you witness how ancient teachings helped transform the life of a twenty-first-century writer, wife, and mother.

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The Bloomsbury Photographs

By Maggie Humm,

Book cover of The Bloomsbury Photographs

Maggie Humm Author Of Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Woolfian Gym devotee World-traveller

Maggie's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays.

The Bloomsbury…

The Bloomsbury Photographs

By Maggie Humm,

What is this book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group's key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs

Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are…


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Interested in the Cree, the patriarchy, and gorillas?

The Cree 13 books
The Patriarchy 85 books
Gorillas 13 books