Category: good to read

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

Alex Belser, PhD, Clancy Cavnar, PsyD, and Beatriz Cauiby Labate, PhD
By addressing and dismantling sexist, heteronormative, transphobic, and homophobic forms of oppression in the psychedelic community, this collection lays groundwork for an inclusive future. Queering Psychedelics features a broad range of perspectives from queer academic researchers, LGBTQIA+ clinicians, and indigenous and transgender advocates. This book interrogates the continuing radical potential of queer psychedelia in today’s era of assimilation, paving the way for an inclusive and intersectional world.
Synergetic Press

Bob Dylan
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny.
Simon and Schuster

Quentin Tarantino
Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever. In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. 
Harper Collins

Patti Smith
In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message “Hello Everybody!” Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape, and more than a million followers responded to Smith’s unique aesthetic in images that chart her passions, devotions, obsessions, and whims.
Bloomsbury

Greta Thunberg
Around the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists, and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face. Alongside them, Greta shares her own stories of learning, demonstrating, and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing the extent to which we have been kept in the dark. Once we are given the full picture, we will be able to act. If a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
Penguin Books

Andrew Newberg 
Spiritual experiences have occurred within people around the world and throughout history, up to and including the present day. The founders of every major religion described them, philosophers since antiquity have pondered them, and according to recent polls, about thirty percent of people still report them. A century ago, philosopher and psychologist William James famously analyzed accounts of these experiences and raised questions for future scientific study. Now, modern science has some answers.
Oxford University Press

Mitch Horowitz
All of us today dwell in uncertain places – realities in which thoughts make things happen. ESP is provable by the scientific methods once used to debunk it, UFOs are mainstream, and magick no longer requires rite and ritual but is as near as your own mind. Today’s leading voice of esotericism and the occult, Mitch Horowitz, an award-winning historian, offers a thought-provoking investigation of the spiritual, the occult, the magickal, and the extra-physical.
Inner Traditions

Amy Tintera
Seventeen-year-old Maisie Rojas has spent her entire life in the Q—a post-pandemic quarantine zone that was once Austin, Texas. Born and raised behind the high security walls that sealed their fate, she’s now a trusted lieutenant for one of the territory’s controlling families. Lennon Pierce, the charismatic son of a US presidential candidate, has just been kidnapped by his father’s enemies and dropped out of a plane into the. Maisie must get him out or he will be permanently infected and forced to remain.
Penguin Random House

Edgar Gomez
In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others. A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man,High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden.
Soft Scull Press

Sophie Strand
Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legends readily cut down our forests, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculinity have always been hiding in plains sight. Sharing eight years of research, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths
Inner Traditions

Maurice Sendak
The most comprehensive survey of the work of Maurice Sendak, the most celebrated picture book artist of all time. With previously unpublished archival materials.
Distributed Art Publishers

Marlene Seven Bremner
The author takes the reader on a Hermetic journey through each of the seven traditional planets –Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon – exploring their mythological, philosophical, alchemical, Qabalistic, magical, astrological, and energetic natures and offering meditative discourses that reach past the rational mind to speak directly to the intuitive soul. She relates the seven planets to the esoteric anatomy of the human body, specifically the seven chakras, and shows how the planets can offer understanding and experience of archetypal energies and patterns in the body, in one’s life, and in the creative process.
Inner Traditions

Jonathan Goldman
The Mystery Schools of Egypt, Greece, and Rome understood that vibration is the fundamental active force in the universe and developed specific chants and tones for healing the mind, body, and spirit and achieving altered states of consciousness. Jonathan Goldman is director of the Sound Healers Association, president of Spirit Music, and has over twenty years experience in sound therapy. He pioneered many of the techniques found in this book that are now used worldwide, including «Vowels As Mantra» and «Overtoning».
Healing Arts Press

Nathalie Livingstone
The story of the family who rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become synonymous with wealth and power has been much mythologized. Yet half the Rothschilds, the women, remain virtually unknown. From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the English branch of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty first.
Hodder & Stoughton

Olivie Blake
Inside the Alexandrian Society alliances will be tested, hearts will be broken and all must pick a side. Six magicians were offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Five are now members of the Society. And two paths lie before them. In this thrilling next instalment, the secret society of Alexandrians is unmasked. Its newest recruits realize the institute is capable of raw, world-changing power. It’s also headed by a man with plans to change life as we know it – and these are already under way.
Penguin Books

Marc B. Aixalà
Marc B. Aixalà is a telecommunications engineer, psychologist, psychotherapist and certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator specializing in supporting people who face challenging experiences with expanded states of consciousness. Psychedelic Integration outlines foundational practices like rest and nutrition, spiritual approaches including water rituals and tarot, embodied techniques of dance and singing, and frameworks including Holotropic Breathwork, Gestalt therapy and integration circles.
Synergetic Press

Beth Macy
Like the treatment innovators she profiles, Beth Macy meets the opioid crisis where it is. Bearing witness with clear eyes, intrepid curiosity, and unfailing empathy, she brings us the crucial next instalment in the story of the defining disaster of our era, one that touches every single one of us, whether directly or indirectly. A complex story of public health, big pharma, dark money, politics, race, and class that is by turns harrowing and heartening, infuriating and inspiring.
Hachette

Mona Sobhani, Ph.D.
The author shares extensive research on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter, detailing her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker. Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist with a doctorate from the University of Southern California. A former research scientist at said University , she also was a scholar with the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics. Her her work has been featured in major publications.
Simon & Schuster 

Baba Masha, M.D.
The author details how to safely identify, harvest, prepare, and preserve Amanita muscaria. She shares dozens of extensive personal Amanita microdose reports from study participants, highlighting the positive, negative, and neutral effects they experienced., as well as reporting on higher doses and their effects. Revealing the vast healing potential of this ancient mushroom ally shows how Amanita can help with many health conditions and activate the ability to feel the value and the significance of one’s own life experience.
Park Street Press 

Colm Tóibín
The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. Finding himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, he had a clear vision of the future in the second, anticipating the horrors of Nazism. He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would write some of the greatest works of European literature, and win the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.Through one life, Colm Tóibín tells the breathtaking story of the twentieth century.
Penguin Books

Claudio Naranjo
The late Dr. Claudio Naranjo structured the meditations in Dionysian Buddhism to guide individuals towards acceptance of what is, to meet pain with joy, expand awareness into consciousness, and to learn how to share in the full presence of others. In Dionysian Buddhism, Naranjo draws on traditions from Theravada to Vajrayana in order to create a work that emphasizes both the experiential and multifaceted aspects of meditation. “Only a change of consciousness might save our world,” he wrote. “And that in view of this collective shift in consciousness there is nothing more relevant we can do than start with ourselves.”
Synergetic Press

Sachin Kundalkar
This novel confronts issues of sexuality in a changing society through a love triangle between a brother, sister, and their family’s lodger, an artist living in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, but he’s also a man of mystery. Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegant and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition.
New Press

Jim Morris
During his third tour of duty in Vietnam where he served as a Green Beret, John Morris was wounded badly enough to be retired from the army. He came home bitter, angry that his career had been ended until he discovered LSD and the fact that many of Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster had served in the army too. Retired U.S. Army Special Forces Major Jim Morris has worked as a civil rights advocate for the mountain peoples with whom he fought, the Montagnard, and his Vietnam memoir, War Story, won the first Bernal Diaz Award for military non-fiction. For decades he has immersed himself in a deep study of Toltec shamanism.
Bear & Company

Carole Nervig
On the small Pacific island of Pohnpei, Carole Nervig discovered hundreds of petroglyphs carved on gigantic boulders. She began comparing them with petroglyphs and symbols from around the world. Documenting her discoveries on Pohnpei and revealing how the archetypal symbols of the Pohnpaid petroglyphs have exact counterparts in other ancient cultures and universal motifs throughout the world, she provides evidence that Pohnpaid predates – neighbouring Nan Madol and shows how Pohnpaid was an outpost of Kahnihmueiso, a city of Mu, or Lemuria. 
Simon and Schuster

Henry Sanderson
We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers and, increasingly, our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining. Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world. Henry Sanderson covered commodities and mining for the Financial Times for seven years. He tweets at @hjesanderson. 
One World Publishing

Ralph Metzner 
Drawing from multiple disciplines ranging across the world’s cultures (beginning with his collaborations with Dr. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard University in the early 1960s), Dr. Metzner explores subtle concepts using a tapestry of myth, allegory, and historical context. The Unfolding Self promises to provide its reader with valuable tools to become “wise, impartial judges” in their process of transformation into becoming a more integrated and fulfilled person. Readers who immerse themselves in these masterful descriptions can catalyse their own process of evolution.
Synergetic Press | May 22

Aviva Rachmani
Artist Aviva Rahmani offers a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos finds transparency into the moments in Rahmani’s life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects—Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use—Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life’s work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.
New Village Press | June 22

Ed Yong
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. And much more.
Random House | June 22

Ottessa Moshfegh
ittle Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine.
Penguin | June 22

Kate Khavari
Newly minted research assistant Saffron Everleigh is determined to blaze a new trail at the University College London, but with her colleagues’ beliefs about women’s academic inabilities and not so subtle hints that her deceased father’s reputation paved her way into the botany department, she feels stymied at every turn. When she attends a dinner party for the school, she expects to engage in conversations about the university’s large expedition to the Amazon. What she doesn’t expect is for Mrs. Henry, one of the professors’ wives, to drop to the floor, poisoned by an unknown toxin.
Crooked Lane Books | June 22