Category: good to read

Londoño’s account introduces readers to an array of psychedelic enthusiasts who are upending our understanding of trauma and healing. From Indigenous elders who regard psychedelics as portals to the spirit world to religious leaders using mind-bending substances as sacraments, as well as war veterans who credit psychedelics with alleviating their PTSD, and clinicians trying to resurrect a promising field of medicine hastily abandoned in when the War on Drugs was announced in the 1970s.
Celadon Books

Levine describes the violence of his childhood juxtaposed with specific happy memories and how being guided through Somatic Experiencing (SE) allowed him to illuminate and untangle his traumatic wounds. The man who changed the way psychologists, doctors, and healers understand and treat the wounds of trauma and abuse shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma and offers profound insights into the evolution of his innovative healing method.
Park Street Press

Award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote reveals the fundamental teachings of the Buddha and show how they can be applied to contemporary daily life. The  majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation. Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of everyday life.
Bear Company

In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida. To increase their child’s chance of survival, the Friedmans smuggle the baby out of the ghetto and into the arms of a non-Jewish farm family when Elida is only three months old. It is the beginning of a life marked by constant upheaval.
Harper Paperbacks

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People”.
HighLight Bridge

Amitav Ghosh
Smoke and Ashes. Opium’s Hidden Histories
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.  Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that the author’s own identity and family history was swept up in the story.
John Murray Publishing

Adam Schatz
The Rebel’s Clinic. The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life-and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Farrar Srauss and Giroux

Johann Eglöff
The Darkness Manifesto. On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life
As a devoted friend of the night, Eklöf reveals the startling domino effect of diminishing darkness: insects, dumbfounded by streetlamps, failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered by artificial lights; and bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. For humans, light-induced sleep disturbances impact our hormones and weight, and can contribute to mental health problems like chronic stress and depression. The light bulb —long the symbol of progress and development— needs to be turned off.
Scribner Books

Brad Gooch
Radiant. The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.
Harper Collins

Percival Everett
James
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating wit, James retells the story of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from Jim’s perspective.
Random House

Albert Hofmann
Ergot Alkaloids. History, Chemistry and Therapeutic Uses
First published in 1964, Hofmann’s account is finally available to the anglophone world. Ergot has a colorful history and is just fascinating in its vital applications, from contracting and blood stemming preparation used in childbirth, to treatment for migraine headaches, as a geriatric, and as a mind-alerting remedy. Of equal interest is ergot’s botany, the grains it grows upon being vital for our nourishment. The importance of ergot in medicine cannot be overestimated. (SGS)
Synergetic Press

Steve Rolles and Ester Kincová
How to Regulate Psychedelics. A Practical Guide
The four proposed models for psychedelic regulation – explored in detail in this book are: A private use/decriminalisation model including home cultivation, foraging and not-for-profit sharing for plant-based psychedelics; a membership-based not-for-profit association model for plant-based psychedelics; a flexible licensed psychedelic retail model adaptable to different products and environments: model for regulating commercial guided or supervised psychedelic use.
Transform Publishing

Jennifer Higgie
The Other Side. A Story of Women in the Art and Spirit World
Weaving in and out of many mystical lives, from Hildegard of Bingen to Emma Kunz, while sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. The Oher Side is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography and art history.
Orion Publishing Group

Max Miller
Tasting History
“The Tasting History with Max Miller” channel has thrilled food enthusiasts and history buffs alike as Miller recreates a dish from the past, often using historical recipes from vintage texts, but updated for modern kitchens as he tells stories behind the cuisine and culture. From ancient Rome to Ming China to medieval Europe and beyond, Miller has collected the best-loved recipes from around the world and has shared them with his fans.
Simon + Schuster

Lucy Sante
I Heard Her Call My Name. A Memoir of Transition
Born in Belgium to conservative, working-class parents, Lucy Sante was transplanted to the United States, where a feeling of home finally arrived when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s amidst her fellow bohemians. Some of her friends died young, from drugs and AIDS, others became jarringly famous. When she was finally ready, Lucy decided to confront the façade she’d been presenting to everyone, including herself, over these years. I Heard Her Call My Name is the story of that confrontation, of a life with a missing piece that, with transition, falls into place.
Random House

Erica Dyck, Chris Elcock (Eds.)
The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China. Along the way, they also consider how psychedelic experiments generated their own cultural expressions, where the specter of the United States may have loomed large and where colonial empires exerted influence on the local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical pursuits.
MIT Press

Benjamin Breen

In the ’40s and ’50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Grand Central Publishing

Wolf D. Storl, Ph.D.
An ethnobotanical look at ancient heart beliefs, heart-strengthening herbs, and folk remedies for cardiovascular diseases. Traditionally heart disease was not seen as a result of poor nutrition, too much stress or lack of exercise, but reflected an imbalance of the heart’s emotional and spiritual energies. Plants and folk remedies used as traditional heart medicine works on the mental and spiritual levels to help make the heart happy again. Storl offers new ways of looking at heart disease by recognizing how integral the heart is to our entire being.
Simon and Schuster

Joe Roman

From the volcanoes of Iceland to the tropical waters of Hawaii, the great plains of the American heartland, and beyond, Eat, Poop, Die takes readers on an exhilarating and enlightening global adventure, revealing the remarkable ways in which the most basic biological activities of animals make and remake the world-and how a deeper understanding of these cycles provides us with opportunities to undo the environmental damage humanity has wrought on the planet we call home.
Profile Books

Kyle Chayka
In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?
Penguin

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