Category: good to read

Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis
The adventures of Timothy Leary’s odyssee from Harvard to hell and back make for a racy read. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon’s careening, global manhunt for Dr. Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and secret agents on four continents. The “LSD Apostle’s” escape from jail took him to Switzerland, Algeria and Afghanistan and back to jail in California, where Charles Manson was his neighbor. Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews.

Eileen Day McKusick
When Eileen McKusick began offering sound therapy in her massage practice she soon discovered she could use tuning forks to locate and hear disturbances in the energy field, or biofield, that surrounds each of us. She found these energetic disturbances correlated with the emotional and physical traumas her clients had experienced throughout their lives, the biofield acting as a record of pain, stress and trauma from gestation onward.
Healing Arts Press, January 2018

Wallace Stegner 
Stegner retells the story of the bard who became the stuff of fiction for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City businessman. Organiser, rebel, singer of Labor Songs who fought relentllessly for Trade Unions, Joel Hill was a peerless fighter in frequently violent battles between organised labour and industry. This is a full-bodied portrait of both the man & the myth: from his entrance into the short-lived Industrial Workers of the World union to his trial, imprisonment & final martyrdom.
Penguin Random House, January 2018

Mark Russell & Steve Pugh (illustrations) 
In Russell and Feehan’s hands, Hanna-Barbera’s audacious pink mountain lion is given a new, Flintstonian shading: this Snagglepuss is more stylish, more fuchsia, more unapologetic than his original cartoon iteration. He’s a successful, adored playwright, smooth and confident even if the world around him is on fire. He’s also gay, and living as a closeted homosexual mountain lion in 1953 is awful – all the more since success has made him a target.
DC Comics, January 2018

James Oroc 
Entheogens are powerful tools of self-discovery; Oroc studies the works and lives of Albert Hofmann, Terence McKenna and Alexander Shulgin in order to gain deeper insight into the history and future of psychedelics and how to cultivate a positive attitude towards the dreamtime that could transform our culture. The author is an active part of the psychedelic renaissance, a revival that has been a long time coming though it never was a long time gone.
Park Street Press, January 201

Bobby Campbell
Come take a quick trip through the lives & ideas of Robert Anton Wilson in this illustrated elucidation of some but not all his most illuminating memes and profundities. Visionary cartoonist Bobby Campbell gleefully adapts Wilson’s neurosemantic brilliance into the visual language of the comic book medium in an explosion of non-linear, cosmic psychedelia. Whether you are a fully initiated Discordian Pope, or a starry eyed seeker of the 23 enigma, this RAW funny book will bring the synchronistic magick of Illuminatus! right where you are sitting now.
Hilaritas Press, December 2017

Torsten E. Klimmer (Omananda)
Transcendental Journeys is a world traveler’s testimony of three decades. A mystical near death experience in Sumatra starts the spiritual journeys of the author who describes the process of conscious awakening in the collective evolution of man through his visionary writings. This artful multimedia book with photography and embedded video links urges people to free themselves. It inspires direct action towards the profound shift in perspective that is required today. Discoveries in exotic places and shamanic dimensions are slowly revealed during this nonfictional cosmic adventure that offers an exciting view into the visual, spiritual, and practical possibilities available to anyone with an open mind.
© Omananda, December 2017

Peter Carey 
This thrilling, high-speed story starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, the more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture – the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way. Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history. A Long Way from Home is his late-style masterpiece.
Kindle, February 2018

Jin Yong
The world imagined by Chinese writer Jin Yong is one which celebrates loyalty, courage and the triumph of the individual over a corrupt and authoritarian state. The world’s biggest kung fu fantasy writer, Jin Yong, the “Lord of the Rings of Chinese literature” enjoys huge popularity in the Chinese-speaking world. In the west, however, his name is barely known, largely due to the complexity of the world he has created and the puzzle that has posed for translators. Set in China in 1200 and written in the wuxia or fighting hero tradition, A Hero Born tells of an empire close to collapse. Under attack from the Jurchen Jin dynasty, the future of the entire Chinese population rests in the hands of a few lone martial arts exponents.
Kindle, February 2018

Peter Frankopan
Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts.
Penguin, March 2017

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