Books like My Stroke of Insight — picked by fans

Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was sent to Auschwitz by the German Nazis because he was Jewish.

While in the camp, Frankl noticed that individual prisoners responded in totally different ways to the same appalling circumstances: some stole food from others, some hoarded their food, and some shared their food with others. He concludes that human freedom is ineradicable. He also learned from his camp experience that people want meaning in life as much as they want food or water. Human beings do not live for pleasure, but for the discovery of meaning.

I loved this very inspiring and compelling book about how some people, like Frankl, can rise above the most horrendous suffering.

What first gripped me was the insight into how North American Indians organized their societies. It was so interesting to see how it was advantageous to them to be free of the command-and-control leadership style in a competitive battle for economic gains. Instead, they relied on numerous pods of self-organizing systems where people chose who to follow based on what they admired in a person and understood the situation to require. It made them very nimble and creative.

This decentralized system might be the future of organizational leadership or at least a viable alternative. I love how the authors translate traditional wisdom into modern business practices. I really want to wrap my head around this.

This book reveals how the body stores emotional and traumatic memories long after the mind tries to forget them.

Van der Kolk explains why symptoms like anxiety, emotional numbness, anger, or disconnection can surface years later.

Many men who “push through” or never talk about their trauma find clarity in this book’s explanation of how stress affects the brain and nervous system. It helps readers understand themselves physically and emotionally, while giving hope that healing is possible through therapy, mindfulness, and self-awareness.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s classic memoir of bipolar disorder captures the highs and lows of the illness with exceptional clarity. 

She describes the dilemma as a doctor of deciding whether to reveal her diagnosis, a dilemma that resonated with me as a law professor, but is common to many people with bipolar who can “pass for normal” most of the time.

This is a powerful memoir.

As a reader, we follow Paul first as a doctor and then as a patient. He reminds us of our vulnerability when seeking medical care. He questions, “Why was I so authoritative in a surgeon’s coat but so meek in a patient’s gown?”

When Breath Becomes Air is a deep meditation on life and the dying process. Written in the first person, this is a courageous and emotionally charged read. Kalanithi is a courageous pilgrim who documents first-hand his own uncharted territory: death.

Confronted with his end of life, this 37-year-old neurosurgeon reflects on the fundamental universal questions that we will all ponder when facing mortality. Even though the reader is led graciously to death’s door, it remains an abrupt and emotionally devastating shock when, in fact, Paul Kalanithi’s breath simply becomes air.

The memoir of world-renowned psychologist Marsha Linehan, who happens to be someone I greatly admire for creating the treatment that I use: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).  This book relays Linehan’s struggles as a teen and adult with her own mental health condition, including self-harming behaviors and thoughts of suicide, and how her experience contributed to her creation of a therapy that has likely saved millions of lives.

I read this book as part of my Search Inside Yourself (SIY) facilitator training when I worked at Google and later taught. I love this book because it’s full of science-based research on the power of mindfulness. I personally love all of Rick’s books and hosted him on my podcast, The Pausecast podcast (Ep. 17), where he blends his psychology and mindfulness expertise into easy and relatable concepts.

This book stuck out to me because Hanson shares how great teachers like Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Gandhi, and the Buddha all had brains built essentially like anyone else's, yet they were able to harness their thoughts and shape their patterns of thinking in ways that changed history. I was inspired by their stories and also saw how I could model my own thinking in ways that better serve me and the world. 

This is another unconventional recommendation because it’s not only about grief. Maté is a medical doctor whose work focuses on the damage that unprocessed emotional trauma—including grief—does to the body and how to process emotions in a way that is less likely to lead to physical disease.

I think this book is a necessary complement to books about complicated grief because it provides an understanding of what happens when we do not allow ourselves to fully experience grief in a safe and supported manner, and provides insights into how to do so.  

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.

I devoured Eben Alexander’s book about a neurologist’s experiences in a coma. It was fascinating, the kind of book that keeps you glued to your seat. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered reading a book with that title. My rational mind wasn’t open to anything beyond what my senses could verify. I dismissed my mystical experiences as coincidences, skeptical of anything that challenged the laws of physics or hinted at mystery.

Though the word "heaven" still doesn’t resonate with me, I’ve begun to sense something unknown. William Blake said, "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." My growing awareness of my own mortality has made me more receptive to the unknown.

I no longer demand proof or argue with the unseen. Instead, I listen and allow wonder to rise naturally. Death, once seen as an end, now feels like a threshold into something vast… show more.