100 Books Like Sometimes Brilliant

I first met Ram Dass in 1969 in Franklin, NH, three weeks after dropping acid for the first time, and by 1971 I was in India meeting his (and my) guru, Neem Karoli Baba.

In Being Ram Dass, I found out much more about this spiritual wayshower who altered my life so profoundly and taught me the meaning of "be here now" (incidentally, Be Here Now was the first book I ever worked on as an editor). From his explorations in psychedelics, psychology, and bisexuality to god, service, and devotion, it's worth reading about Ram Dass's life odyssey in detail in this captivating memoir.

Mirabai Starr weaves together the threads of feminine mysticism from many different spiritual traditions with a poetic sensibility, yet her feet are planted firmly on Mother Earth as she validates women's wisdom throughout the ages.

I was thrilled with the way this book shows that touching the earth—with all its human pain and suffering, death and loss, even the grief over losing a child as happened to Mirabai in her own journey—is a pathway to the divine, often moreso than meditation and breath work.

The women mystics proudly proclaim that everything is holy, and lead us into surrender to the mystery of the Great Mother. Women reading this book will feel seen and heard.

When I met Danielle Sunberg on Zoom during the pandemic, I was impressed with her ability to listen to her inner voice, to use it as the GPS for navigating her life.

Without relying on the language of the mystics, she describes her transformation from a corporate lawyer in Anne Taylor suits to a backpacking truth seeker as she travels the world in search of her real self. This deceptively simple book can carry the reader into their own insights on the nature of self, life, and spirit through the guidance and questions at the end of each chapter.

It's easily relatable to Westerners who have no interest in Eastern spirituality but are looking for a grounded awareness and higher consciousness. And it's a fun travelogue!

I have known Dena Merriam for many decades and am aware of her very solid and consistent meditation practice and her devotion to her guru, Paramahansa Yogananda.

What I learned in this book is that in her meditation Dena has experienced quite a few of her past lives, and here she takes us back from 20th century Russia to 19th century America, 18th century Africa, early 15th century India, late 15th century Persia, 16th century Japan, and 17th century India. She even recollects what happens in between births.

It's amazing to recognize the patterns, people, and beliefs that we carry along from birth to birth, how the lessons of one life influence the following ones, and the spiritual guidance that takes us through our journeys through time.

Schwartz’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how central black women’s reproduction was to the project of American slavery.

The book illustrates how new doctors needing specialization and clientele found common cause with slaveholders’ needs to control the reproductive capabilities of their enslaved workforce. The ongoing conflicts between slaveholders, enslaved women, and the doctors who were employed to thwart any attempts of resistance and autonomy on their part is truly mind-blowing.

Anyone tracking our current state of affairs post the Dobbs decision, with doctors in states like Texas being forced to choose between providing women necessary healthcare or complying with state law, can see the looming shadow of the history explored in Schwartz’s illuminating book.

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.

This biography of the second century CE celebrity doctor Galen is one of the most surprising and revealing books I’ve ever read about Rome. A native of Asia Minor who got his start treating gladiators, Galen came to Rome and vied for prominence with the city’s intellectuals. By his own account, he wowed Romans with his skill in diagnosis and public vivisections of animals as gruesome as anything you’d see in the arena. Something like one-eighth of all surviving classical Greek literature is made up of Galen’s writings. Susan Mattern excavates this vast body of material to recover Galen’s own astonishing career, his interactions with his patients (including the emperor Marcus Aurelius), and his observations of terrible scenes of Roman life such as a dangerous copper mine, famine in the countryside, and a major fire in 192 that burned down much of the imperial capital.

After I decided to include this old favourite of mine, I discovered to my great delight that Bodies Politic is about to be reissued in paperback. Roy Porter was the most prolific, fluent and insightful academic I have ever been privileged to know, and decades ago, his lectures inspired me to recognise how much fun historical research can be. In my own work, I have focused strongly on images – not only in textbooks, but also in journals, art galleries and albums. As Porter expertly discusses, studying caricatures is immensely enjoyable but also invaluable for uncovering concealed controversies, which provide crucial indicators of what people really thought.

This is an honest, vulnerable book in which the author, an experienced physician at the top of his game, questions his own approach to patients. 

Are we doctors as “scientific” as we think we are, or are we just dependent on rigid protocols and implicit, incorrect beliefs that cause harm? The book provides a road map for doctors and lay readers alike to rethink the doctor-patient relationship and all the decision-making that comes from it.

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.