Category: good to read

Toni Morrison
America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.
© Toni Morrison, September 2017

Peter Wohlleben
Through vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben’s personal experiences in forests and fields. Horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.
Greystone books, November 2017

Rupert Sheldrake
In this pioneering book Rupert Sheldrake shows how science helps validate seven practices on which all religions are built, and which are part of our common human heritage: Meditation, Gratitude, Connecting with nature, Relating to plants, Rituals, Singing and chanting, Pilgrimage and holy places. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier. Rupert Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research in these fields.
Hodder & Stoughton, November 2017

Dr. Richard Louis Miller
This book explores the tumultuous history of psychedelic research, the efforts to restore psychedelic therapies, and the links between psychiatric drugs and mental illness. It includes the work of Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Julie Holland, Dennis McKenna, David Nichols, Charles Grob, Phil Wolfson, Michael and Annie Mithoefer, Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, and Robert Whitaker.
Park Street Press, November 2017

Nelson Mandela & Mandla Langa
The long-awaited second volume of Nelson Mandela’s memoirs, left unfinished at his death and never before available, is here completed and expanded with notes and speeches written by Mandela during his historic presidency, making for a moving sequel to his worldwide bestseller Long Walk to Freedom.
Park Street Press, November 2017

George Saunders
In 1862, when Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie dies, his grieving father reportedly returns to the vault several times, alone, to hold the boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state – called the bardo in the Tibetan tradition – a struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a theatrical panorama of voices to ask the timeless question: How do we live and love when weknow that everything we love must end? We are delighted that a book we chose for you just won the prestigious Booker Prize!
Random House, February 2017

Riccardo Manzotti
What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong
asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural.
John Benjamins, October 2017

Joan Halifax
Joan Halifax has enriched thousands of lives around the world through her work as a humanitarian, a social activist, an anthropologist, and a Buddhist teacher. Over many decades, she has also collaborated with neuroscientists, clinicians, and psychologists to understand how contemplative practice can be a vehicle for social transformation. Through her unusual background, she developed an understanding of how our greatest challenges can become the most valuable source of our wisdom – and how we can transform our experience of suffering into the power of compassion for others.
Flatiron, May 2017

Anthony DeCurtis 
With unparalleled access to dozens of Lou’s friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks the singer’s five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through his most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Lou’s relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reedis an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.
Jon Murray, October 2017

Tobias Churton
Employing the latest research and discoveries, including previously unpublished reminiscences, Tobias Churton investigates the truth beneath the self-crafted mythology of Gurdjieff, revealing a perilous childhood in a Greek family, persecuted by Turks, forced to migrate to Georgia and Armenia, only to grow up amid more war, persecution, genocide and revolt. Placing Gurdjieff in the true context of his times, Churton explores the spiritual teacher’s roles in esoteric movements taking root in the Russian Empire and in epic imperial construction projects in the Kars Oblast, Transcaucasia and central Asia. He reveals the sources of Gurdjieff’s transformative philosophy, his early interest in hypnosis, magic, Theosophy, and spiritualism and the profound influence of the Yezidis and the Sufis, the “gnostics” of Islam, on Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teachings and the “Work.” Churton also explores Gurdjieff’s ties to Freemasonry and his relationships with other spiritual teachers and philosophers of the age, such as Madame Blavatsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Aleister Crowley.
Inner Traditions, June 2017