Here are 100 books that Caravan of No Despair fans have personally recommended if you like
Caravan of No Despair.
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I have always believed that everyone has a story to tell. I have connected to people throughout my life because I chose to sit, listen, and share stories. I do this in my own neighborhood and on my travels worldwide. I do it with people I don’t have anything in common with and people I think I might not like. Every time, without exception, I learn something. Often, I am inspired. These experiences have tested and grown my compassion, empathy, kindness, and understanding capacity. I suppose this is why I love reading. It’s like meeting strangers and sharing stories.
I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.
Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs: “My Whorizontal Life: An Escort’s Tale” and “A Someday Courtesan,” and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show: “My Whorizontal Life: The Show!” I co-host the podcast My Index to Sex. and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. Thinking about how I grew up in a safe, typical suburb in the middle of America made me wonder if the things that happened to me with men as a girl happened to many women as we came of age in the 70s.
We all know the incomparable poet, writer, and speaker she became, but before that was her coming-of-age story. Raw and painful yet written with Maya Angelou's lyrical and insightful eye, this too was a book I started and could not put down.
Drawn into her world as a girl feeling imprisoned inside herself for terrible reasons, she finds that self-love and kindness and the world of words, books, poetry, and writing unlock the cage she was in.
As a woman, as a girl, I would never know the cruel racism she experienced, but her journey into art and its ability to heal and set one free was something I felt kin to.
Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
I have always believed that everyone has a story to tell. I have connected to people throughout my life because I chose to sit, listen, and share stories. I do this in my own neighborhood and on my travels worldwide. I do it with people I don’t have anything in common with and people I think I might not like. Every time, without exception, I learn something. Often, I am inspired. These experiences have tested and grown my compassion, empathy, kindness, and understanding capacity. I suppose this is why I love reading. It’s like meeting strangers and sharing stories.
In the voice of her little girl self, Karr masterfully tells of her fractured childhood. Innocent, vulnerable, and pure, Karr describes life with her sister, a mentally ill, alcoholic mother, and a mostly absent father as only a child can.
She is sure life isn’t supposed to be this way, but without any responsible adults, she doesn’t really know how it should be. It’s beautifully written. I found myself rereading sentences and underlining my favorites. I wanted to read everything about Mary Karr when I had finished.
#4 on The New York Times' list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation
"Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear." -Oprah.com
The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J.…
As a young social worker, I left the world I knew and moved into violent urban centers and traveled the developing world. The suffering and beauty entranced me. Questions reverberated in me: What does it mean to be part of the vast human community? How can I live most fully? When I adopted children, violence and difference confronted me not “out there” but at home. I wrestled, shocked by my own judgment and narrowness—until I accepted in my bones the myriad ways to live a remarkable life. Curiosity became my superpower. Tinderbox, my unflinching memoir, invites readers into my family’s brutal and beautiful transformation through embracing neurodiversity.
Iyer invited me into his two-room flat in the neighborhood of Deer’s Slope, a suburb of Nara in Japan, in the dying days of autumn following his father-in-law’s death.
His descriptions painted scenes of nuanced colors and textures, juxtaposing old and new, thick with metaphor and simile—the only way to talk about the impermanence he explores. His question: “How to hold on to things we love even though we know that we and they are dying?” My question as well.
I watched him play ping pong with quirky Japanese elders at the local health club and wandered through his thoughts on family, spirituality, endings, love, and timelessness. The book has the gentleness, purposefulness, and peace of a slow walk through a Japanese garden.
For decades now, Pico Iyer has been based for much of the year in Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, share a two-room apartment. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying.
In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, this question has a special urgency and currency. Iyer leads us through the autumn following…
Fascinated with consciousness, spirituality, and the power of mind, I started reading books by Thich Nhat Hahn, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and Alan Watts as early as 5th grade. But I was also infatuated with math and logic, which led to a degree in mathematics at UC Berkeley. Knowing there was more to understanding truth beyond logic, I balanced out my worldview with an M.A. in transpersonal psychology. For more than twenty years, I have passionately devoted myself to the study and practice of transformation. As a certified coach using expertise in interpersonal neurobiology, design thinking, and Conversational Intelligence®, I have provided thousands of transformative experiences for individuals, executives, teams, and organizations.
This is one of those books you don’t find–it finds you. At least, that’s what happened to me. When my friend first recommended it, I remember reading part of the first chapter captivated. But for whatever reason, I failed to continue reading it.
Years later, it fell off the shelf while I was trying to decide which of the books on my bookshelf was the one to read. Boy, did it catapult me into a wildly evolved level of consciousness. It ripped me open (in a gentle and inviting way) cleared me of fears and beliefs I didn’t even know I had and transformed me from being a human being reaching for spirituality to a spiritual being reaching out to humanity.
Why is it so difficult to simply be present? The reason is that our deeply suppressed emotional imprints from childhood -- which Eckhart Tolle calls "the pain-body" -- distract from an awareness of the present moment. We're not broken and don't need to be healed but rather, our discomfort needs to be integrated. The Presence Process is a journey that guides readers into taking responsibility for our emotional integration. It is a way to consciously grow up and become responsible for determining the quality of our personal experience. The book teaches readers how to exercise authentic personal responsibility in a…
My passion and subsequent expertise in this subject have followed years of self-study and reading. I have tried to make sense of the conflicting views that the world has thrown at me, confusing me by each claiming to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (the seller's marketplace).The books in this series, reflect how difficult it is to be yourself and how much courage it takes to break free of your conditioning, parental or societal. It covers the necessary breakdown of the internal personality, so that a new you can emerge from the cocoon of the reassembled old you, butterfly-like.
Stanislav Grof co-authored The Stormy Search For The Self with his then-wife Christina. It was a follow-up to his earlier work, Spiritual Emergency, which emphasised that this was a global transformation in the understanding of mental illness and included contributions from other professionals in the field. It also indicated that more primitive societies viewed this situation with more sympathy than Western medicine did at the time. It was also the start of inclusion about how other phenomena related to this subject, including drug-induced states and UFOs. Current thought in recent years has also brought into the near-death experience and understanding has linked them all under the umbrella of consciousness studies.
Many people are undergoing a profound personal transformation associated with spiritual opening. Under favorable circumstances, this process results in emotional healing, a radical shift in values, and a profound awareness of the mystical dimension of existence. For some, these changes are gradual and relatively smooth, but for others they can be so rapid and dramatic that they interfere with effective everyday functioning, creating tremendous inner turmoil. Unfortunately, many traditional health-care professionals do not recognize the positive potential of these crises; they often see them as manifestations of mental disease and repsond with stigmatizing labels, suppressive drugs, and even institutionalization.
I’ve worked on the frontlines of the hospital, clinic, and delivery rooms for the last 25 years and in global settings after traumatic disasters…As a physician activist, Justice is my act of service. And yet, the moment I found out my young son had a fatal illness, fighting for Justice felt elusive. Until I started fighting for myself. Until I realized that if I walked back toward my unfathomable pain, I could find something revolutionary... Joy. Now, this work of finding Joy has become my most potent medicine for my patients and myself. It is my mission to make sure everyone knows Joy is accessible. No matter what.
I love this book of poetry because it is so easy to pick up and read one poem like a meditation.
Each one invites the reader to explore Joy in their surroundings and inner world as something that is so accessible to them. I use it almost as a mirror to reflect back to myself my most powerful and Joyful capacity when I have forgotten it. It’s a perfect book for anyone’s bedside or altar.
A celebration of hope. An encounter with grace. A restoration of the heart. A healing of wounds. An anthem of freedom. This illustrated collection of poetry and prose invites you to stumble into the sunlight and delight in the wild and boundless grace you've been given.
Popular Instagram poet and bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols gives you the ultimate love letter to your mind, heart, soul, and body, reminding you:
There is a purpose in every season
No matter how you want to race through this day or run away from this place, you are invited to live fully-right here,…
I am a holistic adult and child psychiatrist, astrologer, shamanic practitioner, and energy healer who has been in practice for 35 years. I am thoroughly familiar with the conventional paradigm for treating psychiatric illness, but I no longer endorse it and, in fact, believe that it causes harm. I am convinced that there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in medicine at this time of collapse and breakdown on the planet. The sacred's vital role in healing needs to be acknowledged, as does the role of nutrition and lifestyle, as well as a need to identify and treat the root causes of illness rather than simply suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals.
This book delivers such an important and deeply needed message at this time of accelerated change on our planet when so many people feel lost, fearful, alienated, and disconnected.
Many patients who consult me in my practice of psychiatry have a longing to feel clearer about their life purpose and what they are meant to do with their lives. They long for a connection to a more soulful aspect of themselves. This book provides many stories of individuals who were courageously able to respond to their heart’s calling and to change their lives dramatically in ways that resulted in their existence feeling more meaningful and aligned with their soul’s purpose.
This book inspires the reader to dare to make big changes, to get out of their comfort zone, and to find a way of living that feels more authentic and satisfying.
How do we know if we're following our true callings? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us?
is the first book to examine the many kinds of calls we receive and the great variety of channels through which they come to us. A calling may be to do something (change careers, go back to school, have a child) or to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving). While honoring a calling's essential mystery, this book also guides readers to ask and answer the fundamental…
Way back in 1994 I decided to build my career on the mission of helping people make better choices with their time. And my goal has always been to keep the solutions simple. I believe we have way too much in our lives that is complex and hard. While my primary work is as a keynote speaker, I have chosen to devote a significant amount of my professional hours to being a coach. I love helping people develop a plan for improvement that is aligned with their values and goals, and then walking with them through their season of change.
I always love books that give me a clear plan to improve some aspect of my life. Comer’s book has four key principles that are easy to remember and apply every day. They include silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. My favorite quote from the book was, “For all the talk about hurry and overload, most of it is self-inflicted.”
Who are you becoming? That was the question nagging pastor and author John Mark Comer. By outward metrics, everything appeared successful. But inwardly, things weren't pretty. So he turned to a trusted mentor for guidance and heard these words: 'Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.' It wasn't the response he expected, but it continues to be the answer he needs.
Too often we treat the symptoms of toxicity in our modern world instead of trying to pinpoint the cause. A growing number of voices are pointing at hurry, or busyness as…
We have been fascinated by the power and energy of Love as far back as either of us remember. Each of our life's purposes revolves around the belief that Love is the most powerful force in the universe. We support our LoveFoundation and mission to bring Love awareness to individuals and to the world. We are both transformational life coaches and believe and teach that love is essence. Our mission is to change the paradigm of the world from fear to Love, building on the foundation of Absolute Love, restoring hope and faith into the hearts of the world.
The gifts Lisa shares inside this book, are practical and powerful with many tips, tools, practices, and resources for harmonious transformation.
You will experience love at a deeper level. You being the subject of life to create the life you deserve and desire. A different perspective that is worth reading. This is the second book to Lisa’s first book Love Is the Seed.
She teaches how you can plant seeds of love in your life to live fully engaged with love, thought, and free will. Practical loving wisdom shared to help you find within you all that you need, a practical approach to self-mastery and loving yourself.
"The Three Supreme Gifts is a genuine and honest guide that would make for an amazing gift or for personal exploration that will leave you feeling encouraged, rejuvenated, and with a deeper spiritual understanding."- Liz Konkel, Readers' Favorite
"Reading, digesting, and deepening my understanding of The Three Supreme Gifts has been nothing short of transformational. Lisa Hromada shows us the indisputable truth about who we are innately, and provides an easily understandable framework for the depth of love and inner knowing / guidance that is always available to us."- Barb Wade, M.A.
