100 books like Saved

A candid often comical memoir about finding love and coming to terms with illness, Martin doesn’t shy away from the unflattering bits of looking for your soul mate while also dealing with the complications of MS.

Self-deprecating humor, unflinching depictions of award sexual encounters and unfortunate side effects (the chapter "Shit Happens has some quality toilet humor), this book will make you laugh out loud, which, in my opinion, makes this an exceptional memoir about chronic illness.

New motherhood comes with it many pressures. The pressure to take care of a newborn and yourself, for starters.  There is also a societal pressure, it seems, as we strive to be the perfect mother. We feel everyone is questioning our every "mother-move." Vicki Iovine's book is a help in this regard. Written with honesty and humor, it gives new mothers a glimpse "behind closed doors" to the "real" world of new motherhood. Knowing that you are not alone is always a help! My favorite part is the author’s honesty. It is refreshing to hear an opinion, agree or not.

Jim Downs offers an essential corrective to the view of emancipation as a kind of liberal or progressive “triumphalist narrative.” Downs approaches the illness and death that the freed people suffered during and after the Civil War as a major public health crisis. He does not question the historical necessity or the morality of emancipation, but he shows that the disruptions and chaos that attended emancipation—often exacerbated by federal policy—also resulted in immeasurable human suffering and countless deaths. Historians have long recognized that emancipation was a messy affair. But what I find especially compelling is that Downs raises the question of whether the hardship caused by federal emancipation policy was intrinsic to that policy (however unintentional) or incidental—what we might call today “collateral damage.”

This is the best book I’ve read on the science behind canine nutrition and helping someone's dog live a long and happy life. Rodney Habib and veterinarian Karen Becker create a prescriptive plan that integrates nutritional health sciences through the study of the most long-lived canines. They incorporate environmental principles, stress reduction, and the principles of an overall healthy lifestyle with preeminent science about what nutrients dogs require. They emphasize stress, isolation, and psychological factors, how even exposure to negative energy—insults and mean behavior—can so badly affect dogs and their owners alike.

The authors also dig deep into the subject of what pet food manufacturers don’t want customers to know about. They help the reader get out from the matrix of how we typically feed our canine companions, with information about how standard pet foods are made with the lowest quality ingredients, based on how large corporations do not consider… show more.

This book was life-changing for me. Annemarie Colbin shares so much wisdom about eating whole foods as opposed to being on any kind of diet. She is a big advocate of “listening to your body.” She even asserts that if you “forget” to take your supplements, it could be because your body doesn’t need them at this time. In that case, she encourages taking a short break. This book inspired in me the idea of trusting your body to let you know what foods are best for you.

Suzanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic epitomizes what I call the “material memoir,” a mode of writing autobiography that seeks to understand the self through connections to places and substances. Antonetta bravely examines her own physical and mental health, grappling with scientific data: “I choked facts and they choked me back, they stuck like Legos—clingy but hard to build into anything real.” Recalling the nuclear warhead that caught fire nearby her childhood home, spraying radioactive particles, she notes that her entire family, bizarrely, has somehow forgotten this incident. Body Toxic is fascinating, chilling, and unnerving, but also beautifully written in unflinching yet poetic prose. Body Toxic convinced me that our life stories are incomplete if they ignore how places and substances have affected us.

This book opened my eyes to the importance of learning to breathe correctly and the fact that very few people actually understand how to breathe.

I learned that the breath is the primary tool that we have conscious control over, which allows us to impact our physiology and the overall function of our cells. The impact that our breath has led me to understand how important it is in supporting brain health, weight loss, autonomic control, and immune system function. 

I have used this information personally to significantly improve my workouts and bike rides and optimize my recovery days.

As a black woman who has had to explain my hair texture, color, and why my hair does what it does has affected my self-esteem at times. This process was simplified with the help of Curly Nikki’s,  Better Than Good Hair which is a must-read.

It doesn’t matter if you struggle with kinky, coiled, or straight having a hair problem can be problematic. This book has changed my life in the sense of how I show up in my truth. If you have ever second-guessed yourself or are in a pinch and unsure what to do with your hair, products, or styling this is your book to grab.

Curly Nikki has changed the game on how women are seen in corporate and not only that hair is an extension of our outfits but tied to our souls. Therefore, it is super important to protect your hair piece and your… show more.

Mindfulness is a powerful practice, proven to decrease stress and help us live more in the present moment. Acclaimed psychologist and researcher Dr. Lori Brotto is the brilliant pioneer to apply mindfulness to sexuality.

Dr. Brotto had been using mindfulness with great success to help her patients and she thus wrote a book to spread the word more broadly. In this book, she explains the reasons people have sexual problems and provides easy, effective exercises to help them. And, even if a reader doesn’t have a sexual problem, mindfulness can simply enhance sexual pleasure and satisfaction.

I have recommended this book to countless clients and students. I meditate each morning and practice mindfulness myself, inside and outside of the bedroom, and I’ve learned a lot from Dr. Brotto’s work.

This story about four patients cared for by nurse practitioner and acclaimed poet Cortney Davis reminds me a bit of pandemic narratives in that she works in a public clinic with individuals whose financial, emotional, or social situation puts them at risk. Since her patients are all female, their needs are related to gynecology, but the bigger story is Cortney’s ability to connect with them on a humanistic level and share their hopes, concerns, and fears.