97 Books Like A Face for Picasso

For months, Asian women in Oakland, CA, reported a nonstop stream of harassment and muggings by local youth. The problem: their harassers were Black. In a lineup, the women couldn't identify their attackers, and they walked free. To counter this, women in the community received cross-racial training...which failed. The robberies stopped when cameras were installed and the police didn't need a victim to ID anymore. Eberhardt’s book is full of gems like this, smart snippets of life, and the innate biases that run it. This smart examination of cognitive biases goes further than pointing out how racial biases influence criminal justice — it also offers some solutions, especially for unconscious prejudices. These take the form of unconscious bias training, and forcing people to deal with uncomfortable subjects.

I first encountered medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris when she published The Butchering Art, a biographer of pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister. This is another gore-flecked narrative that focuses on facial surgeon Harold Gillies’ pioneering work formulating ingenious surgical innovations and transforming the lives of patients disfigured fighting in WW1.

Plastic surgery has been around since the French Revolution, but attempts at facial reconstruction were limited. Gillies became fascinated by plastic surgery after watching French surgeon Hippolyte Morestin remove a cancer tumor from a patient’s face and cover it with a flap of skin taken from their own neck. In 1916, he requisitioned a ward at Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot, to cope with the grotesque procession of disfigured men disembarking from the hospital trains. He assembled a team of retired doctors, medical students, and even a vet to try to give these men their dignity back. A Daily Mail reporter at… show more.

This book spares no punches, diving straight into the chaos that was the Women’s House of Detention in NYC’s Greenwich Village, aka The Hellhole in the 60s and 70s. First-person narratives and choice juicy details make the lives of the women come alive, from their annual fashion show to their cellblock politics and pink-painted bars. All too often, dispatches like this lack color and clarity, but this unfiltered take is far more gripping, and avoids stereotypes. We meet a wide range of people, scarred sex workers who refuse plastic surgery as “it’s too late for them,” pregnant teens who dreamt of hair salon careers, and substance abusers who cycled in and out, multiple times.

Despite being forced to live in rat-infested slum-like conditions, with shoddy medical care, many of the women remained spirited, even upbeat. But their continued struggle to maintain their sense of identity and femininity, despite minimal resources,… show more.

This book is an eye-opening, mind-boggling, data-driven analysis of just how skewed society is against those who don’t conform to the standard of pretty. The author, a Stanford law professor, takes a deep dive into how legally ingrained physical discrimination has become, drawing on pertinent examples to illustrate what could, in other hands, be dry reading.

The examples will fire you up – a Reno bartender fired for not wearing makeup, a New Jersey cocktail waitress fired for gaining a dress size, a straight-A student expelled due to a high BMI…none of whom had any legal recourse, as it stands today. The lack of legal protection for appearance bias has clear social and psychological costs, and this book is a great call to arms for change.

I’ll admit it—Jodi Picoult gets me in the feels every single time. But this was the one that hooked me. I thought I knew what I’d do if faced with the choice to conceive a child to save another. Simple, right? You save your kid.

But this story unraveled all my assumptions. It made me pause and really consider the perspective of the child conceived for a purpose. Then it threw the whole family into court—and suddenly, I was questioning everything again. I found myself discovering new values I didn’t even know I held.

This book didn’t just move me—it changed me.

An extraordinary book written by an extraordinary woman.

Donna’s autobiography shares her often difficult childhood story and her ‘discovery’ that she was autistic at a time when diagnosis for women was uncommon. Her tale is harrowing at times, yet inspiring and so fascinating to learn of her life. A real classic of a book written by an autistic woman.

For Morris, war was a siren call, “exalting” work that allowed him to “challenge death.” But once redeployed to the safety of America, he realized that months and years of waiting for the next bomb to explode had taught his body to react to potential threats in the environment that his mind rightfully ignored. A sack of trash at the side of the road. A car backfiring. A restless crowd. For the combat veteran, these everyday triggers can generate a crippling flashback or a spiraling panic, the body shooting up flares of alarm before the mind has time to recognize that in America, a bag of trash is just trash. The Evil Hours is a brilliant, evocative, and often poetic portrayal of one man’s quest to leave the war behind.

First of all, I love everything I've ever read from Helen Hoang.

Getting inside the heads of her characters feels like such a privilege, always providing a different way of viewing the world. In this book, watching the characters come to understand and love each other through neurodivergence, language, and cultural differences was so beautiful. I couldn't put it down!

Franzen is at his best when depicting character, and The Corrections goes deep, creating a family drama that is rooted in detailed psychological portraits of his subjects.

In doing so, he meticulously builds their worlds, motivations, and fears, creating nuanced portrayals that not only reveal individual personality, but also the texture and color of life in America in the late 20th century.

Yet the true theme of the book is family dynamics: what does it mean when your mother insists that you come home for Christmas, and what does it mean when you don’t really want to go?

I saw myself in this book in ways I didn’t expect.

Stephanie Foo’s story of complex trauma, the gaslighting she endured, and her drive to overachieve just to feel worthy hit close to home. Like her, I turned to spiritual practices seeking peace, and like her, I often felt alone in that process.

This book reminded me that my thoughts and feelings are not only valid, but worthy of compassion. The therapy sessions toward the end were especially powerful. I felt like her therapist was speaking directly to me, and something in me softened.

If you're breaking intergenerational patterns, this book offers deep healing, insight, and a sense of being profoundly understood.