Here are 100 books that We Are All Perfectly Fine fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
This thoughtful, well-written memoir of a medical doctor and historian reminded me of why we doctors practice medicine.
The story of her years at Laguna Honda, a long-term rehabilitation hospital for indigent patients, presented me with a kind of medical practice as different as possible from the intensive care I myself practiced: Slow Medicine, which promotes close observation and deep listening, just sitting together, allowing time to do at least some of the healing. Laguna Honda was a place of hospitality, community, and charity.
I take comfort in knowing that there is still a place for these values in today’s highly fragmented, technologized, and speeded-up “healthcare system.” I was particularly moved by Sweet’s reflectiveness and vibrant humanity as she allowed “God’s Hotel” to heal her even as it—and she—healed her patients.
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now!
For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle).
San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves—“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care—ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
Michele Harper’s memoir is beautifully written, and her compassion and empathy shine through.
I was deeply moved by the way in which she carried that clear-eyed compassion forward from a trauma-ridden childhood through her medical training—where she, as a Black woman, experienced both racism and sexism—and into her life as an emergency room physician. I admired her forthrightness in calling out these injustices as she saw and experienced them while still maintaining her own humanity. I was inspired by her integrity and by the way she showed us, through her own life and the lives of her patients, that, as she says in the epilogue, “[b]rokenness can be a remarkable gift.”
“Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo
As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and more
An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
I loved this memoir because it is a story of incredible resilience.
I was deeply moved by the author’s ability to recount the stark facts of the heartbreaking intergenerational trauma she suffered while showing how her early life experiences of deprivation and abuse helped pave the way for her compassionate work with patients and populations. I nodded in recognition and sometimes laughed out loud at her account of her Catholic school education, which I could relate to my own experience.
I was awestruck by her grit and determination to rise above her difficult circumstances without any kind of model and little or no encouragement. I was inspired by her ability to find love and a fulfilling career after such a rocky start, and I’m sure her patients appreciate the depth of her compassion.
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
This novel by a neurologist/palliative care physician appealed to me because of its highly idiosyncratic yet spot-on accounts of many things I experienced in my own medical training.
I found her writing style challenging because of the novel’s highly fragmented structure, but I appreciated her trenchant observations and stunning language. Like other authors I’ve recommended, her protagonist comes from a devastatingly traumatic background. I could really relate to this fictional medical trainee’s struggles with despair and suicidality.
Reading this book was like a dash of ice water to the face, and I pondered it for weeks after I finished it.
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
Now that’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences. Here’s goes…
This is among the finest examples of the true-crime genre. It’s an enthralling, pacey, and ingeniously structured account of the murders committed on both sides of the Atlantic by Dr. Neill Cream, a Scottish-born Canadian whose medical career served as camouflage for his psychopathic misogyny.
Macabre though the subject matter is, Jobb never wallows in that side of things, preferring to use the story as a vehicle for his vivid and insightful portrait of late nineteenth-century society.
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream takes readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard follows the trail of a cold-blooded serial killer who was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper and who would finally be brought to justice by detectives employing a new science called forensics.
"When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals," Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream poisoned at least ten women in the United States, Britain,…
I live in the past, even as the wellness industry tells me to be present. I try to be present! Of course, I also worry about the future. Time for me, inexorably, moves both backward and forward. I’m always writing things down, scared of forgetting. How do other people do it? That’s why I read fiction (or one of the reasons). As Philip Roth said of his father in Patrimony, “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.”
Nobody for my dollar moves between front story and back story better than the Canadian author Alice Munro, whose 2013 Nobel Prize was recognition not only for the brilliance of her career but also for the possibilities of the short story as a form.
The final story in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” is among the most lasting fiction I’ve read, a meditation on memory and its limitations, as well as the compromises people make to help those they love and have hurt.
In the her tenth collection (the title story of which is the basis for the new film Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance.…
I have always been fascinated by human behaviour since going to a school where we were told there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. That never felt right to me – human beings are much bigger than that! I studied Counselling and Therapy at Norwich City College in the 1990s and later specific courses on Transactional Analysis. Many years on, I am still learning…
This isn’t the easiest of reads, but it is the Real Thing – the work of the man who discovered the Triangle itself.
I love its density and the fact that I can come back to it over and over again and find new ideas. Dr Karpman’s long experience as a working therapist speaks out from every page.
Though I’ve coached endurance athletes to world championships, I’m an expert on not working out. It’s what you do when you’re not training that matters most! All the books on this list teach habits that help you relax about things that don’t matter while guiding you to define what does matter and explaining ways to most efficiently focus your energies there. This jibes with my work as a yoga teacher: we seek to find the right application of effort, and to layer in ease wherever possible. I don’t think it’s stretching too much to call each book on the list both a work of philosophy and also a deeply practical life manual.
Speaking of doing hard things, this excellent book contextualizes peak performance in sports and life. It straddles and bridges these two worlds, helping me understand why my training is a chance to develop life skills that work in any arena. And it uses plenty of evidence-based science to do that!
I love that Magness uses basic principles of mindfulness, a world I know well, but in new applications. The book is full of doable exercises that wouldn’t be out of place in a yoga or meditation class.
"In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness beautifully and persuasively reimagines our understanding of toughness. This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life's biggest challenges." -- Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Talking to Strangers and host of the Revisionist History podcast
From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.
Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge…
I grew up with the music of the 1960s. Going to packed, pheromone-heavy dances featuring The Lincolns—Nova Scotia’s most popular and most soulful band—were a huge part of my teenage years. Those experiences implanted a deep love of R&B, and somehow or other pointed me in the direction of becoming a writer. It’s a bit of a mystery how it all works. In any case, of all my books, none was as much fun to work on as Kings of Friday Night. It has received lots of love, including from readers who grew up far from the time and place I write about. Long live local bands! And live music everywhere!
Joni Mitchell’s career extended long after the 1960s, but that was the decade when she burst on the scene with her distinctive voice and incredible song-writing and musical abilities. This book provides in-depth details of how she went from being an unknown blonde girl from Saskatchewan to an undisputed folk music superstar with songs like no one else. As Leonard Cohen put it: “She was like a storm.” To present Joni’s story, the author conducted interviews with Mitchell and her childhood friends, and with the many others who played important roles in her life—including Cohen, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and David Crosby. Along the way, David Yaffe reveals the backstory behind all of Joni’s songs. It’s a fascinating book.
Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
I have been a historian of the Indigenous world for more than two decades, but I have learnedso much since I expanded my perspective from Mesoamerica and the Aztec-Mexica into the wider history of Native peoples. There are literally hundreds of Indigenous communities across the world and so there is always more to learn. I have been incredibly privileged to learn by listening to Indigenous people – in person, in print, and on digital and social media. I hope these books can offer some starting points to set you on a similar journey of discovery, opening up some new ways of thinking and of seeing both the past and the present.
A Canadian of Polish and Ojibwe descent, you can tell that Talaga is an experienced journalist, as this moving book is a combination of clear narrative and incisive research.
Starting with Canada, but then widening her lens to Indigenous communities across the world, Talaga shows how the violence of colonialism, the rupture from land and community, and the loss of heritage – compounded by socioeconomic deprivation – has resulted in an epidemic of youth suicide and generational trauma across Indigenous communities.
Talaga’s analysis is devastating, but also gives hope of a possible future reconciliation, through examples of resilience and the recovery of Indigenous ways of knowing and being.
The world's Indigenous communities are fighting to live and dying too young. In this vital and incisive work, Tanya Talaga explores intergenerational trauma and the alarming rise of youth suicide.
From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life - all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations…
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