100 Books Like Birthing a Slave

When I read this book as a young lawyer in reproductive rights in the 1990s, it resonated deeply with the daily bias that I witnessed against my clients. Decades later, a highlight of my book tour was being invited to do a talk with Professor Roberts at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Dorothy Roberts’ exploration of “race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty” is powerful.

Her writing clearly lays out how restrictions on abortion, parenting, and access to basic health care are shaped by and also perpetuate American racism. This book inspired me to work for equity and reproductive freedom for all, and hopefully, it will continue to do so for others, too. 

No one writes like Gayl Jones.

Her language, voice, and narrative style make her a singular entity all unto herself. Her first novel, Corregidora, explores the tumultuous life of a blues singer haunted by a dastardly familial trauma. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, has just suffered a horrible accident that renders her unable to have children. 

What happens afterwards is a complex and raw exploration of lineage, darkness, and sexuality. It’s a haunting, relentless book. And it’s not hyperbole to say that it changed the course of black women’s literature.

The rest of us, trying to grapple with the intricacies of race & sex, are simply writing in her wake.

I love books that help us understand our present and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s latest novel, Take My Hand, helps us do just that.

Civil, the protagonist, is a young nurse who’s just secured her first job at a federally funded reproductive health clinic in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. When she’s sent out on a house call to administer birth control shots to the Williams sisters, ages 11 and 13, Civil must grapple with what she’s being asked to do and why. 

Loosely based on the Relf sisters, the two young defendants at the heart of the Relf vs. Weinberger case, which exposed the involuntary sterilization of thousands of poor women and women of color across the South, this novel takes on a weighty subject with great finesse and care.

This account of Smith’s lauded 35-year career as a midwife in rural Alabama is fascinating.

What I appreciate about this book most is how it maps out the growing tensions that developed between African-American lay midwives and the medical establishment, once the Department of Labor began to regulate midwifery practices in the early twentieth century.

From increased scrutinization and criminalization of folk traditions, like medicinal teas and oil massages, licensed midwives with clinical training found themselves hamstrung by increasing regulation, until they were pushed out of the field altogether in the late 1970s.

The vacuum of maternal healthcare left in their wake has been devastating. Such that, we’re still seeing repercussions to this day. 

Dr. Larry, as he is known to our Neem Karoli Baba satsang (the community of seekers), has written a tour de force memoir of his extraordinary adventures, starting as a young hippie doctor in Detroit and moving on to cofounding one of the first digital social networks (The WELL), cofounding the Seva Foundation (restoring sight to millions of blind people), and being a key player in eradicating smallpox.

He is chair of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and the epidemiologist California Governor Newsom called upon to set up COVID protocols for the entertainment industry. To me, the deepest value of Sometimes Brilliant is the way it illustrates how science and service to humanity combine with spiritual awareness and love—the perfect mix of karma yoga and bhakti (service and devotion).

I am a passionate advocate for the process of using foods and supplements, especially natural herbal ones to aid the body in the cleansing and detoxification process. This is one of the best books describing this process to help support and rejuvenate from the inside out.

Utilizing data from split-brain patients (whose left and right cerebral hemispheres had been surgically separated), the authors of this book focus on how our “two minds” yield a unitary consciousness.

This is the book that first lit the fire of inquiry for me. The whole idea was to understand the “integrated” mind by first understanding the minds of individuals that had been divided by severing the corpus callosum (which connected their two cerebral hemispheres) in order to alleviate medically intractable epilepsy.

It was suggested that in such individuals, their “minds” were divided as well. Yet some later studies did suggest that some intercommunication (through other channels) did survive.

This very readable book recovers the expressions, beliefs, and behaviors of early modern patients. It illuminates how understandings of disease causation, the progress of illness, sickbed experiences, and recovery were expressed in distinctly gendered ways. The richly detailed discussion describes how religious beliefs and social interactions shaped the experience of health and medicine at this time. Weisser draws on over forty diaries and fifty collections of correspondence from the middling and upper levels of society to paint this picture. To illuminate the experiences of the sick poor Weisser turns to pauper petitions, designed to overturn decisions made by overseers of the poor, presented to magistrates at the Quarter sessions of ten locations. It thus reveals the sick lives of those at every level of society.

This superb biography is an engrossing account of the mysterious title surgeon and the doctor’s fascinating world. James Miranda Barry joined the British Army in 1813 as a regimental surgeon and served in colonial posts for the next fifty years. But Barry had been born Margaret Bulkley, an anatomical female—a surprise revealed after the doctor’s death.

Was Barry’s masquerade strategic, the doctor’s only route to a medical career? Was Barry a transgender person? I wondered if the “truth” would remain a mystery. Rachel Holmes persuaded me that the probable answer lies in a document “gathering dust” in Edinburgh’s medical school archives, a revelation she saves for the last chapter. 

Originally published in 1987 this book is a classic text for those studying health and disease in this era. Drawing on diaries and printed materials it explains what people died of in the era and what conditions they lived with. It describes how people responded to ill health both spiritually and medically and it provides a series of case studies to illuminate different aspects of health, including women’s health. Using practitioners’ casebooks, it thinks about the differences between an urban surgeon and the practice of rural physicians. It thus moves beyond generalizations to show that practitioners worked alongside each other to heal patients drawn from different socio-economic backgrounds and that the practice of medicine was supplemented and relied upon interventions by friends, family, and community.