Category: good to read

Brigitte Grof
Stanislav Grof, LSD Pioneer. From Pharmacology to Archetypes
Created in honor of his 90th birthday, this book celebrates the profound life’s work of Stanislav Grof, M.D., pioneer in psychedelic research and transpersonal psychology. Featuring an extended interview between Stan and his wife, Brigitte, the book explores in depth the full arc of his research in his own words as well as the history of LSD. With testimonies by Jack Kornfield, Rupert Sheldrake, Ervin Laszlo, Richard Tarnas, Rick Doblin, Roger Walsh, David Steindl-Rast, Fritjof Capra, and Cathy Coleman, and others.
Park Street Press

Madison Margolin
Exile and Ecstasy. Growing up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground
Double Blind editor and journalist Madison Margolin sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism. It’s a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic. Through the perspective of having grown up among “HinJews” in the Ram Dass community and cannabis legalization movement, she takes the reader on a journey inside New York’s Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground.
Hay House

Jennifer Chesak
The Psilocybin Handbook for Women: How Magic Mushrooms, Psychedelic Therapy, and Microdosing Can Benefit Your Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Health
Does psilocybin affect women differently? Does it matter where I am in my cycle when I use psilocybin? Can psilocybin help with menstrual migraines, endometriosis, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder? Will psilocybin boost my sex life? Do hormones have an impact on the entourage effect? What the heck is the entourage effect? And more.
Simon and Schuster

Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Freeing Sexuality. Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex
From podcasts on Mind, Body, Health, and Politics 
We learn from sex therapists, relationship experts, and tantric sex teachers, such as Lonnie Barbach, Stella Resnick, Katherine Rowland, and Diana Richardson, about the importance of communication, how to keep sensuality alive, and how to generate fulfilling and sustainable intimacy in relationships. Looking at sexual identity and non-monogamy, we hear from Ritch Savin, Sumati Sparks, and Janet Hardy, author of The Ethical Slut, as well as from Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on the possibilities of ecosexuality.
Park Street Press

Simon Sebag Montefiore
The World. A Family History
This is world history on the most grand and intimate scale – spanning centuries, continents and cultures, and linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology to the people at the centre of the human drama. As spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the story of humankind in all its joy, sorrow, romance, ingenuity and cruelty in a ground-breaking, single narrative that will forever shift the boundaries of what history can achieve.
Orion Publishing

Mona Sobhani
Startled by her mother’s uncanny ability of reading coffee dregs, Mona embarks on a journey to encounter and confront her own skepticism. She finds proof of past lives and accurate sensitives in materialistic L.A., leading her to reconsider her beliefs. To her great surprise, many of her colleagues are interested in the same questions she is, as she looks for the scientific evidence to buttress her new-found interest. Well worth reading! (sgs)
Park Street Press

Rachel Newer
With its power to dismantle psychological defenses and induce feelings of empathy, self-compassion, and love, MDMA may answer profound questions about how we became human, and how to heal our broken social bonds. Once vilified as a Schedule I substance, MDMA  is now being hailed as a therapeutic agent that could transform the field of mental health as the first psychedelic approved for widespread clinical use.
Bloomsbury Academic

Alexander Shulgin
The Nature of Drugs series presents the story of humanity’s relationship with psychoactive substances from the perspective of a master psychopharmacologist and beloved luminary in the study of chemistry, pharmacology and consciousness. Transcribed from the original lectures recorded at San Francisco State University  in 1987.
Synergetic Press

Journal of the Psychonaut
Psychedelic experiences have the potential to dramatically change us for the better, but only if we truly integrate what we’ve learned from them into our everyday lives. This journal is your sacred space to prepare for and then integrate these lessons from your explorations of non-ordinary states of consciousness. We encourage you to color outside the lines, break the rules, and above all else work with this journal in the way that fits you best. Available via The Psychedelic Salon
MAPS via Synergetic Press

Mike Marinacci
From LSD-powered guru Timothy Leary to cannabis sex cults to psychedelic outlaw churches, Mike Marinacci presents a comprehensive tour of North American religious sects and spiritual groups who use entheogens and psychoactive drugs in the search for higher consciousness, mystical insight, and spiritual enlightenment. A comprehensive tour of North American spiritual groups that use psychoactive drugs in the search for higher consciousness.
Park Street Press

Mika Jay
From Sigmund Freud’s experiments with cocaine to William James’s epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism.
Yale University Press

Peter Attia
Dr Peter Attia, the world’s top longevity expert who is featured on Chris Hemsworth’s National Geographic documentary LIMITLESS, believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity. This isn’t ‘biohacking,’ it’s science: a well-founded strategic approach to extending lifespan while improving our physical, cognitive and emotional health, making each decade better than the one before.
Vermillion

Hanna Pick-Goslar
In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. As the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam progressed, Anne and the Frank family seemingly vanished, leaving behind unmade beds and dishes in the sink-but no trace of Anne’s precious diary. This is the story of childhood and friendship during one of the darkest periods in the world’s history.
Little, Brown and Company

Connie Zweig, PhD. 
Within each of us is a spiritual longing that prompts us to unite with something greater than ourselves, to awaken to our unity with all of life. Yet, no matter the spiritual path we choose, we inevitably encounter our own shadow, those unconscious aspects of ourselves that we suppress or deny, or the shadows of our teachers and their secret desires about money, sex, and power.
Simon & Schuster

Jen Frey
Everyone has the ability to consciously communicate with Plants. Jen Frey shows that if we are willing to listen, we can hear the Plants speak to our Hearts and teach us how to heal. With the support of our Plant allies, we can be our truest selves and remember our intrinsic wholeness.
Bear & Company

Helena Hansen, David Herzberg and Jules Netherland
Black people on drugs get police, prison, and methadone; white folks get therapy, sympathy, and buprenorphine. Meanwhile, the biggest dealers, pharmaceutical companies, get fines and wrist slaps, but continue to profit by creating addicts and then selling drugs promising a cure. Why? The answers are here.
University of California Press 

Robert J. Campbell
Campbell relates how LSD allowed users to enhance the perception of alternative realities and describes its wide-scale use in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco from 1964 to 1967. Combining literature, social history, and personal experience, the author traces the birth, downfall, and legacy of the innovative, playful, and spontaneous counterculture launched in 1960s Haight-Ashbury.
Suny Press

Akwasi Owusu Bempah, Tahira Rehmatullah
From the start, the War on Drugs targeted Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans already disadvantaged by a system stacked against them. Even now, as white Americans who largely escaped the fire capitalize on the legalization movement and a booming cannabis industry, their less fortunate peers continue to suffer the consequences of the systemic racism in policing and failed drug policy that fueled the original crisis.
MIT Press

William Gropper
«The book is a witty social realist graphic novel of life among working-class variety performers—or maybe it’s a graphic ballad, with its surface simplicity. But the story gains in depth on repeated viewing—and each viewing is a delight, as Gropper’s cartooning masterfully reveals character through expressive gestures in efficiently observed spaces. He tells his story with a bold, graceful, and athletic brush line—somehow both light and weighty—that soars and swings across the pages until the artist, and the woman at the center of this tale, land firmly on their feet.» (Art Spiegelman)
New York Review Comics

Anne Vieth, Walter König, Stefan Zweifel
There’s a new, English-language book out about my son, an artist and also the president of gaiamedia. It provides detailed and graphically elaborate insights into twenty-five years of his artistic work. In addition to its documentary character, the book deals with art history. Various theoretical approaches can be distinguished and interpreted looking at Kerim’s endeavors. (sgs)
Cornerhouse Publications

Christine Hauskeller & Peter Sjöstedt Hughes (Eds.)
What do psychedelics reveal about consciousness? What impact have psychedelics had on philosophy? In this rapidly growing area of study, this is the first volume to explore the philosophy of psychedelic experience, from a range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. Written by leading international scholars, the essays cover Western and non-Western traditions, from analytic philosophy to Zen Buddhism.
Bloomsbury Academic

Alexander Beiner
Psychedelics have hit the mainstream as powerful new mental health treatments. But as clinicians explore what these molecules can do for our individual minds, The Bigger Picture goes further to illuminate how psychedelics can help us find new ways to make sense of and come through the crises we face around the world. It draws on the latest research, as well as his unique experience as a participant in a ground-breaking clinical trial investigating the potent psychedelic DMT.
Hay House

Prof. David Nutt
After fifty years of prohibition, criminalisation and fear, science is finally showing us that psychedelics are not dangerous or harmful. Instead, when used according to tested, safe and ethical guidelines, they are our most powerful newest treatment of mental health conditions, from depression, PTSD, and OCD to disordered eating and even addiction and chronic pain. Are you ready to change your mind?
Yellow Kite

Sara Bakewell
Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging, personal, thought-provoking, and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history—mostly, but not exclusively, in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy, Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is, why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds, and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.
Penguin Press

Nicole Chung
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.  Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.
Esco 

Adam L. Haberstadt, Franz Vollenweider, David E. Nichols (Eds.)
This volume brings together the latest basic and clinical research examining the effects and underlying mechanisms of psychedelic drugs. Examples of drugs within this group include LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. Despite their structural differences, these compounds produce remarkably similar experiences in humans and share a common mechanism of action.
Springer Berlin 

Jacques Privat
Privat reveals that the Vikings were in Greenland, its neighboring islands, and the eastern shores of Canada long before Columbus. He examines in depth how Greenland and its surroundings were inhabited for nearly 5 centuries by two Nordic colonies, Vestri-bygd and Eystri-bygd, which disappeared mysteriously: one in 1342 and the other in the 16th century.
Simon & Schuster

Greta Thunberg
This book gathers the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers, and meteorologists; engineers, economists, and mathematicians; historians, philosophers, and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
Penguin Books

Sander van der Linden 
With remarkable clarity, the author explains why our brains are so vulnerable to misinformation, how it spreads across social networks, and what we can do to protect ourselves and others. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds, exploiting shortcuts in how we see and process information to alter our beliefs, modify our memories, and replicate at astonishing rates. Here, readers practical tools to defend themselves and others against nefarious persuasion.
W.W. Norton

Alba de Cespedes and Ann Goldstein
Sudden impulse – she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, fears her husband will discover her new habit and the constant churn of the domestic routine. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. The roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart.
Pushkin Press

Lama Mike Crowley
Techniques for Buddhists who wish to incorporate psychedelics into their practice as well as for psychonauts who are interested in the maps of inner space provided by Buddhism. The author details how psychedelics have led to spontaneous awakening experiences and describes meditation techniques, with special attention being given to the generation of the Four Positive Attitudes.
Park Street Press

Mattha Busby
I have answered this question with yes ever since I spent a summer as a junior sociologist with the Canadian Commission into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, in Ottawa, in 1972. Combining visuals with carefully constructed narrative text, Bushby’s contribution to this crucial question provides a survey of the history of drug use, a review of the impact of the War on Drugs, an appraisal of the effects of legal versus illegal drugs, and an evaluation of the impact of the decriminalization of drugs.
Thames & Hudson

David Graeber
Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies –vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire. Graeber studied the politics and history of slavery and magic in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis and is the author of The Dawn of Everything.
Farrar Strauss and Giroux

Joshua Cohen
Corbin College, in New York State, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not an historian of the Jews – is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies.
Random House

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D.
One of our immune system’s key defenses is ozone, an oxygen molecule (O3) naturally produced by our antibodies to fight germs, viruses, and other invaders. For more than a century, doctors have used ozone therapy to effectively and safely treat a wide variety of diseases. Seifer shows not only how ozone therapy is effective against current viruses such as Covid-19 and Ebola but also how it can help the immune system learn to protect itself against emerging future viruses.
Healings Arts Press

Tai Shani / Amy Hale
From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind’s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus ergot, the chemical basis of LSD.
Strange Attractor Press

Andrew Brobyn
Equal parts hilarious and terrifying, Babble On is a psycho-philosophical memoir that tracks Brobyn as he navigates the consequences of his eccentric choices and struggles with profound ambivalence toward his own health and well-being. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer. See an interview with the author here.
Dundurn Press

Bret Easton Ellis
Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city, The Shards is Ellis at his gripping, sly, suspenseful, haunting, and often darkly funny best.
Knopf

Alan Sanderson M.D.
Dr. Sanderson shares his extensive research on the afterlife, the survival of consciousness after physical death, and paranormal phenomena related to the spirit world. He explains his practice of psychiatric spirit release, centered on the spiritual and psychic aspects of emotional disturbance, and shares case studies complete with full accounts of treatment sessions. A comprehensive examination of spirit existence and the survival of consciousness after death.
Park Street Press

Ren Hurst
Looking at the domestication of humanity, the author explains the nature of trauma and disconnection from the perspective of emotional development. She unveils thirteen principles of unconditional love for deprogramming yourself, healing the trauma of domestication, and restoring deep connection to inner guidance, your wild soul, and, ultimately, freedom. Ren Hurst shows how, an authentic relationship between human and animal – or between two people – is possible.
Simon & Schuster

Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Over the past decade, many famous entrepreneurs and celebrities have begun to open up about their life-changing experiences with psychedelics that led to their personal successes. Revealing the psychedelic wisdom uncovered in spite of decades of the “War on Drugs,” Dr. Miller and his contributors show how LSD and other psychedelics offer a pathway to creativity, healing, innovation, and liberation, sharing stories of psychedelic transformation, insight, and wisdom from his conversations with 19 scientists, doctors, therapists, and teachers, many of whom you know.
Park Street Press

Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker
Sacred Activism –creative, wise, sacredly inspired action– offers an antidote to the crises facing our world. This book reveals how to uncover and sustain joy and how to use it as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times. The authors include practical maps about transformative mystical traditions. explore potential antidotes, drawn from mystical tradition and Sacred Activism, to help us find inspiration and act in the face of the challenges to our world.
Inner Traditons

Tere Arcq, Susan Aberth, Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington
The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. She saw the tarot as a model of the universe, rather than a tool for divination. This second, considerably expanded edition explores further the central position that the Tarot held in Carrington’s work and contains previously unpublished photographs and images.
Editorial RM

Bruce Scofield
Bruce Scofield argues that astrology is not only a practice but also a science, specifically a form of systems science–a set of techniques for mapping and analyzing self-organizing systems. Presenting a broad look at how the cosmic environment shapes nature, the author shows how the practice and natural science of astrology can expand its applications in modern society in such varied fields as medicine, history, and sociology.
Inner Traditions

Jay Jackson’s
In 1942, almost a year after America entered the Second World War, Jay Jackson—a former railroad worker and sign painter, now working as a cartoonist and illustrator for the legendary Black newspaper the Chicago Defender—did something unexpected He took the Defender’s stale and long-running gag strip Bungleton Green and remade it into a gripping, anti-racist science-fiction adventure comic. Jackson’s stories present a radical vision of a brighter American future.
New York Review Comics