Here are 100 books that Body Toxic fans have personally recommended if you like
Body Toxic.
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All my life, I’ve been aware that there are many layers to reality, many of which are human fabrications. Some are physical, like roads. Some are social, like healthcare. But the ones that control our lives the most, and that determine our global outcomes (poverty, war and ecological degradation for example), are ideological. The most powerful of these is our economic system. If we are to address the meta-crisis, I feel passionately that we need to be able to question and reimagine the economy. All the books I’ve chosen have been really important in helping me to think differently about things we usually take for granted.
I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.
I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
In my various professional roles, I help people prepare for a world that does not yet exist. I often talk with students, scholars, politicians, industry leaders, community advocates, and others about how emerging, digital technology changes the world. And yet, technology doesn’t come from nowhere—we make it! And use it! And misuse it! We also sometimes forget that something as simple as fire can be understood as technology or that our imaginations and care for others are the most important technology. The books on this list encourage us to explore building a world that serves all of us—not just some of us.
This book is unlike anything I’d ever read, but I desperately needed it. As the title suggests, the book flows with deep wisdom from within oceans. As a long-time resident of a landlocked state, I’ve always approached large bodies of water with a sense of awe (and, quite honestly, fear).
This creative nonfiction tells the story of possibility, kinship, and collective kindness available in the depths. The book itself is a technology for living well with others and ourselves.
Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to…
I’ve been passionate about animals, the environment, and social justice since I was a child. As an adult I have been frustrated—even enraged—that so many products and practices are considered safe and “normal” even though they harm wildlife, pets, and people. I think it's bizarre that people imagine themselves as separate from the chemicals they spray in their homes and their yards, even as they breathe in the toxins. I hope that the concept of “transcorporeality,” which urges us to see our own bodies as literally part of the environment, will convince people that environmentalism isn’t optional but is a vital part of human health and social justice.
Like everything Audre Lorde wrote, this slim book is powerful and revolutionary. Lorde refuses to see her breast cancer as just a personal problem, and instead, as a Black lesbian feminist, traces its origins to larger economic, industrial, and political forces, including food additives and air pollution. Her activist research is impressive, but it is her fierce, bold critiques that I find most inspiring. She calls out the medical establishment, “We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.” She condemns psychological “causes” of cancer, “It is easier to demand happiness than clean up the environment.” Lorde calls us to understand ourselves within a matrix of social and environmental forces and to make change.
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
A Penguin Classic
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself…
I’ve been passionate about animals, the environment, and social justice since I was a child. As an adult I have been frustrated—even enraged—that so many products and practices are considered safe and “normal” even though they harm wildlife, pets, and people. I think it's bizarre that people imagine themselves as separate from the chemicals they spray in their homes and their yards, even as they breathe in the toxins. I hope that the concept of “transcorporeality,” which urges us to see our own bodies as literally part of the environment, will convince people that environmentalism isn’t optional but is a vital part of human health and social justice.
The title says it all: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer! This massive study demonstrates how political and economic forces have restricted, diminished, and warped our understanding of the causes of cancer. Not a conspiracy theory, this meticulously researched study carefully demonstrates how science is shaped by economic forces in ways that leave us without the information we need to lead healthier lives. This is no accident, since, as Proctor explains, ignorance doesn’t just happen, it is constructed: “Controversy can be engineered, ignorance and uncertainty can be manufactured, maintained, and disseminated.” In our rapidly transforming world, we need approaches to science that neither dismiss it nor assume that it is capturing everything it should, since it is shaped by politics and economics.
This brilliantly argued and researched book tells the story of how government regulatory agencies, scientists, trade associations, and environmentalists, have managed to obscure the issues and prevent concerted action. Explains why we still dont have straight answers to questions such as: Why do rates from some cancers appear to have risen and others fallen? and suggests how we might actually win the war on cancer.
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
This book fucked me up so much, in the best of ways.
It is spare, tonal, and manages to lay it all out there with an economy of language that allows the more horrifying aspects (there are many) of Manguso’s medical odyssey through debilitating chronic illness to really resonate. There are details of what she endured that rattle around my head regularly. SM uses language to make you understand experiences that most people (if you’re lucky) will never have to feel.
A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice
The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.
There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.
But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.
I am a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I work on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. My interest in adversity is both personal and philosophical: it comes from my own experience with chronic pain and from a desire to revive the tradition of moral philosophy as a medium of self-help. My last book was Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and I have also written about baseball and philosophy, stand-up comedy, and the American author H. P. Lovecraft.
Alphonse Daudet’s notebooks on pain are among the most explicit, honest, and consoling treatments of chronic illness ever written. Daudet was a contemporary of Flaubert, admired as a novelist of provincial France by such luminaries as Charles Dickens and Henry James. Like Flaubert, Daudet suffered from syphilis and he planned to write a book about his experience. He died before he could do that, but his notebooks survive. As someone who lives with chronic pain, I cherish Daudet’s frank but never saccharine advice and his commitment to compassion for others in the teeth of his own suffering.
A “startling [and] splendid” book (The New York Times Book Review) from one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century on his years of enduring severe illness—a classic in the literary annals of human suffering. • Edited and translated by the bestselling, Booker Prize winning author of The Sense of an Ending.
“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit.” —Alphonse Daudet
Daudet (1840–1897) was a greatly admired writer during his lifetime, praised by Dickens and Henry James. In the prime of his life, he…
As a woman who suffers from chronic illness, I am interested in sharing my experience and learning about other women who also suffer and survive their chronic conditions. I have had endometriosis, a painful disease, since I was a teenager. I’ve always enjoyed stories about different kinds of chronic illnesses, and I appreciate the way pain and sickness can be translated into memorable books.
Although I may be biased in recommending my former mentor’s book, this memoir about Khakpour’s experience with mysterious illnesses and addictions is a must read.
Written in sharp, often poetic prose, the author offers an intimate portrait of a chronically ill woman of color navigating the frustrating world of doctors, tests, theories, medications, and doubt. The reader is pulled into this dark, gritty story of benzodiazepine abuse, debilitating symptoms, economic hardship, and, ultimately, diagnosis.
I love every book ever written by Khakpour, however, Sick is my absolute favorite (so far!) Not only could I relate to her experience in many ways, I adore her willingness to share all the messy, difficult pieces of her life.
A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Reivew, and LitHub.
Time Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018 • Boston Globe's 25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 • Buzzfeed's 33 Most Exciting New Books • GQ Best Non Fiction Book of 2018 • Bustle’s 28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list • Nylon’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 • Electric Literature’s 46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love…
I’ve been working professionally as a writer for twenty-five years. I’m nothing close to a household name, but a number of my articles have gone viral throughout the years. I’ve had educators reach out to mention they’ve taught my work at both the high school and college levels. Writing is an occupation of passion, and the authors I’ve mentioned are all talented and passionate about their craft. It’s rare to find people who speak the truth anywhere in our society. These writers don’t just speak the truth, they make it sing.
This book is a heartbreaking work that is a comfort to anyone who is dealing with loss. Alison details the events of her life as she nursed her husband through his struggle with ALS. This is a very open and vulnerable piece of writing that will help provide readers with a blueprint for how to survive dark times.
"A mesmerizing memoir by a talented writer on coming to terms with the unexpected." ―Library Journal
Marty, age 57, was given a preliminary diagnosis of ALS by his family doctor. Seven weeks later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a neurologist. Ten months and ten days later, Marty passed away.
From day one, Alison, Marty’s spouse of over twenty-five years, kept a journal as a way to navigate the overwhelming state of her mind and soul. Soon the rawness of her words harmonized to tell the story of Marty’s diagnosis, illness, and decline. Her journal became a chronicle of caregiving as…
In the years since I was 15, I have been writing and publishing books. After graduating from Florida Virtual School in 2014, I am currently pursuing a liberal arts degree with a focus on disabilities education. I'm passionate about literature, and I've dedicated myself to educating others about disabilities through my love of literature. Furthermore, I own a radio station and produce several podcasts related to disability. I contribute to seven different sites, including the mighty thought catalog and unwritten, where I talk about my life as a 27-year-old with a disability. I am also an advocate for disability rights, as well as a writer and author for disability issues.
A humorous take on what it's like to be a disabled adult. I highly recommend this book to anyone. It discusses how to interact with someone with a disability and dives deep into diversity and how to communicate effectively with adults. Having read this book has made my journey with cerebral palsy much easier and I would definitely say that it has made me look at life in more humorous ways.
Not So Different offers a humorous, relatable, and refreshingly honest glimpse into Shane Burcaw’s life. Shane tackles many of the mundane and quirky questions that he’s often asked about living with a disability, and shows readers that he’s just as approachable, friendly, and funny as anyone else.
Shane Burcaw was born with a rare disease called spinal muscular atrophy, which hinders his muscles’ growth. As a result, his body hasn’t grown bigger and stronger as he’s gotten older—it’s gotten smaller and weaker instead. This hasn’t stopped him from doing the things he enjoys (like eating pizza and playing sports and…
Mary Karr once wrote, "A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it." I totally agree with that. In forty years, I’ve yet to encounter a magical family where everybody gets along, nobody screams things they don’t mean, and there’s never a need to drown your feelings in food or drugs or booze. I grew up in a more-than-averagely dysfunctional household, where poor health and crippling anxiety frequently raised their ugly heads. Since losing my younger sister to mental illness six years ago, I’ve worked hard to make sense of our past, both through my own writing and through the work of authors who write so well about family dynamics.
I was first introduced to Hornbacher’s classic memoir in 2007 by my little sister, who was desperate to help me understand the eating disorder that had plagued her for more than 15 years. The book was—is—a no-holds-barred account of life with an eating disorder, a terrifying narrative of a young woman's gradual and deliberate path towards self-destruction, and it left me in pieces for weeks afterward. And yet, despite the pain it caused, it really did help me understand my sister’s illness better, and in doing so helped reduce the divide that had begun to open between us. Seonaid died in the summer of 2016 after battling anorexia for over 20 years, but even through my grief, I remain grateful to this work for teaching me how to remain strong and patient in the face of this heartbreaking disease.
A 'retired career anorexic' examines herself and her, and our, culture in a masterpiece of confessional literature.
At the age of four Marya Hornbacher looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At nine, she was bulimic. At twelve, she was anorexic. By the time she was eighteen, she'd been hospitalized five times, once in the loony bin. Her doctors and her parents had given up on her; they were watching her die. But Marya decided to live. Four years on, now 22, here is her harrowing tale, powerfully told in a virtuoso mix of memoir, cultural criticism and…
