Here are 100 books that At the Will of the Body fans have personally recommended if you like
At the Will of the Body.
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I used to think of television as a third parent. As a child of immigrants, I learned a lot about being an American from the media. Soon, I realized there were limits to what I could learn because media and tech privilege profit over community. For 20 years, I have studied what happens when people decide to make media outside of corporations. I have interviewed hundreds of filmmakers, written hundreds of blogs and articles, curated festivals, juried awards, and ultimately founded my own platform, all resulting in four books. My greatest teachers have been artists, healers, and family—chosen and by blood—who have created spaces for honesty, vulnerability, and creative conflict.
This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”
Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.
Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.
She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.
What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
During my medical career, specializing as a psychiatrist in a cancer hospital in England, I observed huge variations in the way patients respond to the diagnosis of physical disease. Some become overwhelmed by distress, some carry on just as before, but others make positive and creative changes that are inspiring to witness. Coping can be especially challenging and complex for clinicians who find themselves in the role of patient. My five chosen books are all written by doctors and illustrate how the illness experience has shaped their lives. Now retired from medicine, I am based in New Zealand, and I have interests in writing, choral singing, and animal welfare.
Dipping into this uplifting book before bed each night gave me gentle reminders of the deeper meaning that can be found even in the most mundane of incidents. The folksy title doesn’t do justice to the quality of these 70-odd short stories, which are based on the author’s experience in medical practice and personal life.
Rachel Remen developed Crohn’s disease in her teens, and despite continuing ill health requiring multiple surgeries and an ileostomy, she went on to have a long career as a doctor. I don’t know if she kept a reflective journal about daily events, but this book made me wish I had done so myself.
"I recommend this book highly to everyone." --Deepak Chopra, M.D.
This special updated version of the New York Times-bestseller, Kitchen Table Wisdom, addresses the same spiritual issues that made the original a bestseller: suffering, meaning, love, faith, and miracles.
"Despite the awesome powers of technology, many of us still do not live very well," says Dr. Rachel Remen. "We may need to listen to one another's stories again." Dr. Remen, whose unique perspective on healing comes from her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness, invites us to listen from…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
This thoughtful, well-written memoir of a medical doctor and historian reminded me of why we doctors practice medicine.
The story of her years at Laguna Honda, a long-term rehabilitation hospital for indigent patients, presented me with a kind of medical practice as different as possible from the intensive care I myself practiced: Slow Medicine, which promotes close observation and deep listening, just sitting together, allowing time to do at least some of the healing. Laguna Honda was a place of hospitality, community, and charity.
I take comfort in knowing that there is still a place for these values in today’s highly fragmented, technologized, and speeded-up “healthcare system.” I was particularly moved by Sweet’s reflectiveness and vibrant humanity as she allowed “God’s Hotel” to heal her even as it—and she—healed her patients.
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now!
For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle).
San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves—“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care—ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I earned a Ph.D. in Modern Thought from Stanford and have been an award-winning professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for over three decades. I've also lived with Crohn’s Disease for more than 50 years. At the intersection of these two experiences, I developed a therapeutic practice oriented towards those with chronic and life-threatening illnesses called Healing Counsel. As both a teacher and a counsellor, I ask people to reconsider the ways they make sense of their experiences. I try to assist people to open up new possibilities for healing, not only as individuals, but also as societies, maybe even as a species, or perhaps even as planetary beings.
Many people imagine that healing and dying are antithetical. However, this is not necessarily so. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, death can be healing not just for the person whose life is ending but for those who love them.
Unfortunately, American hospital care does not usually facilitate such graceful transitions. Kaufman, a medical anthropologist, compiles case histories of end-of-life care in medical facilities in order to help us understand the complexities that face us in these contexts. Since most Americans now die in some kind of medical institution, this book should be required reading for everyone—before it happens to us.
Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also…
My favorite books are funny/sad. In my own writing, I aspire for balance between satire and sympathy, going to dark places and shining a light of hilarity on them. I’m compelled by the psychological complexities of desire, particularly in female characters—flawed, average women, struggling for empowerment. For me, desire is inextricably bound with loss. I’m inspired by loss both superficial and profound, from misplaced keys to dying fathers. Many voices clamor in my head, vying for my attention. I’m interested in ambitious misfits, enraged neurotics, pagans, shamans, healers, dealers, grifters, and spiritual seekers who are forced to adapt, construct, reinvent and contort themselves as reality shifts around them.
I started this book because I liked the drawing style. Within the first 3 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. It’s not just Jennifer Hayden’s illustration skills or the freshness of her lines and patterns and mark-making and the way each panel is a masterpiece in itself, it’s the story that pulled me in. This is a book about life and love and family, told with humor, insight, and intelligence. In Jennifer Hayden’s words, the book is “a dramatic comedy sewn together from real events and real emotions,” but that doesn’t begin to convey the richness and depth of this narrative journey and the quirky sarcastic honest way it tells it like it is. The story still resonates long after I finished reading it.
When Jennifer Hayden was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 43, she realized that her tits told a story. Across a lifetime, they'd held so many meanings: hope and fear, pride and embarrassment, life and death. And then they were gone. Now, their story has become a way of understanding her story. Growing up flat-chested and highly aware of her inadequacies... heading off to college, where she "bloomed" in more ways than one... navigating adulthood between her mother's mastectomy, her father's mistress, and her musician boyfriend's problems of his ownnot to mention his sprawling family. Then the kids…
I'm a long-time journalist, wife, mother, and grandmother, who was diagnosed with GYN cancer at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020. My usual subjects are the arts and trauma, but since I’m now one of the more than 600,000 American women with GYN cancer, I decided to write this report about my year of treatment.
This is a scholarly memoir by a co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic, the feminist literary classic, and a professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University. She was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in 2008, then a virtual death sentence. Gubar describes several stages of treatment including "debulking" and chemotherapy and the importance of a loving support system.
The writing is sober, well-documented, comprehensive, and, though published ten years ago, all too relevant.
Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body's betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Loren Mayshark is the author of three non-fiction books. His first book Death: An Exploration won the 2016 Beverly Hills Book Award in the category of Death & Dying and was selected as the honorable mention recipient for the book of the year in the 2016 Foreword INDIES Awards in the category of Grief/Grieving (Adult Nonfiction). Mayshark has a BA in World History with a minor in World Religion from Manhattanville College.
Hitchens was a man on a mission with a razor sharp intellect. These precious words written while Hitchens was losing a fatal battle with cancer are fascinating and he touches on some profound ideas. I was especially struck by the conviction of a man who was a staunch atheist unflinchingly prepared for a godless death. Hitchens was not only witty, but inspirational and courageous.
The starting point of this book was when Christopher Hitchens found he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady'. Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of cancer treatment, enduring huge levels of suffering and eventually losing the power of speech.
Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease and the climax of a lifetime's work of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this confrontation with mortality Hitchens writes eloquently of his fear of losing the ability to write,…
I am an expert on being a cancer patient because I was diagnosed with breast cancer in the fall of 2017. I am also a former oncology and hospice nurse. A cancer diagnosis always feels like a calamity and my work with very sick cancer patients showed me how serious the disease can be. I also thought that our health care system would react to cancer with compassion, but I was wrong. I felt on my own as a patient, and that experience led me to reflect on my nursing work. Healing alternates between me being a nurse and a patient. The alteration shows the failings of our health care system, and how to make it more caring.
I found The Undying Project beautiful and bracing. Like me, the author of this book had breast cancer. Unlike me, she had an aggressive cancer that is difficult to treat and often deadly. Her fear and struggle get transformed into blocks of prose that loosely tell the story of her treatment, but also discuss more philosophical writing on suffering and its meanings. At times I found the book hard to take, but I am so glad I read it because it gave cancer a personal and intellectual context; I hadn’t realized I needed that. The Undying won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
"The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." ―Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
"Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is…
When life’s experiences fall dismally short of expectations, many of us find ourselves lost at a crossroads. When my path to becoming a doctor began to exact an unacceptable toll, I had to find a way out; discharging myself from the hospital was the solution, and by far the best clinical decision of my brief medical career. As a result, I’m still fascinated by choices others make when faced with what seem like impossible obstacles, and where those decisions lead. Following the medical dream from age five, it wasn’t easy to change my life’s course, but that crucial choice allowed me to grow in ways I couldn’t imagine.
Sometimes when faced with impossible choices, the answer is to double down and keep going – even in the face of an existential threat.
As a visual humorist (I deliver my jokes on paper), I shared an immediate rapport with standup comedian Steve Mazan, who was pitching his book at an IdeaFestival, while still dealing with the lingering consequences of liver cancer. Steve’s answer was to say, “I’ve been dying to appear on David Letterman. Now I’m literally dying to do it!”
There’s something to be said of checking off the important boxes on your bucket list. Steve Mazan turned his list into a book, one that delivers a powerful punch line.
Steve Mazan's someday was to perform on The Late Show with David Letterman. In his early thirties Steve was diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer that spread to his liver. Doctors told him he might have only five years left to live. So Steve did something strange: he started living. In a literal race against time, he decided to chase that childhood dream and turn someday into todayhe would perform his act live on The Late Show with David Letterman . . . even if it killed him. With his confidence in a rut and his healthcare bills mounting,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Life caught me by surprise when our youngest son was born with a birth defect that launched our family into the world of surgeries, and treatments. After experiencing the management of chronic care for our child firsthand, I realized how important it is to share personal stories and experiences. It enables empathy and a deeper understanding and appreciation of what patients and families go through. Autobiographical accounts of patients and families are still very limited. We need more people to come forward and share their own patient/family experiences in order to promote the betterment of healthcare and healing through relating with others and learning from others’ experiences.
Imagine being a medical school student in the best of health and full of spirit and ambition, and suddenly being engulfed by a strange and mysterious illness that even the best of doctors in the most renowned hospitals are unable to appropriately diagnose, let alone treat. This chilling story of a doctor who literally chases his own cure is a great example of the much-needed patient advocacy that may often be required to diagnose and treat rare and complex conditions effectively. The author’s passion for finding the underlying cause of his disease (Castleman’s disease) and experimenting with innovative unlikely combinations of drug therapies makes his story memorable and truly inspiring.
LOS ANGELES TIMES AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER • The powerful memoir of a young doctor and former college athlete diagnosed with a rare disease who spearheaded the search for a cure—and became a champion for a new approach to medical research.
“A wonderful and moving chronicle of a doctor’s relentless pursuit, this book serves both patients and physicians in demystifying the science that lies behind medicine.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene
David Fajgenbaum, a former Georgetown quarterback, was nicknamed the Beast in medical school, where he was also known for…
