Books like The Courage to Be — picked by fans

A close college friend lost a child and dear friends to the group's suicide death at the hands of the Rev. Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana. As a physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, I made the decision to use my knowledge, training, and skill in individual, group, and family therapy to explore and try to help others and myself understand and stand up to destructive, controlling gurus of all kinds…from destructive, exploitive religious cults to violent terror group cults like that of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It has been a moving and emotional journey.

“And what do you do?” someone asked at a crowded reception at the NY Academy of Science. “Write—comparative religion.” Startled, he backed away, asking suspiciously, “Why religion? Are you religious?” Yes, incorrigibly—although I grew up among people who regarded religion as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet. While many of us leave institutions behind, identifying as “spiritual, not religious,” I’ve done both—had faith, lost it; then began exploring recent discoveries from Israel and Egypt—Dead Sea Scrolls, Christian “secret gospels,” Buddhist practices, asking, Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? What I love is how such stories, art, music, and rituals engage our imagination and illuminate our experience.

My childhood was marred by change and a search for meaning. Born in the UK to an English mother and Iraqi father, moving to Iraq as a toddler and then back to the UK as a 14-year-old, I was exposed to the dramatic differences in the unwritten rules of how we are meant to behave and experience the world. It was probably inevitable that after training as a doctor, I would eventually end up as a child and adolescent psychiatrist grappling with big questions about life and its struggles. These are the books that opened my mind to re-imagining these dilemmas. I hope they help to open yours, too.

I first became aware of the 1920s through movies such as Some Like it Hot and Thoroughly Modern Millie. I was immediately attracted to what I call the “Booze, beads, and boas.” I felt a kinship with the flappers who were experiencing freedom from the restrictions of the Victorian Era and living their best lives. They were making their own rules and doing it with style! As professor of library science, I researched the history of the American public library and of women in the 1850s-1920s. Today, I write historical cozy mysteries to live out my own glamorous flapper dreams.

I’ve been in the DEI trenches for over 20 years, and let me tell you, it's been one hell of a ride. As a Black woman navigating this shit show, I've seen it all—from clueless executives to well-meaning “allies” who can't get out of their own way. My passion? Calling out the bullshit and actually making DEI work. I've gone toe-to-toe with tech giants, founded Inclusology, and now I'm tackling a second PhD because I believe in the work, even at is most discouraging. DEI-ing is my no-holds-barred guide to creating real change. I’m all about busting AI bias and building DEI that sticks, not just some feel-good fluff. 

For as long as I can remember, it has been of the utmost importance to find meaning in life, both for myself and for everyone else sharing this planet. I have spent much of my time over the course of the past few years pushing for a continued level of discourse in the field of philosophy. I have studied at and attended various educational institutions including Eastern Florida State College, The Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and The University of Cambridge – the studies at such range between philosophy, psychology, behavior analysis, and engineering. I hope that my work will be of some assistance in pushing humanity towards positive progress.

I am actually NOT a good person to make any reading list, because I am not an avid reader. As the most performed playwright in the Chinese speaking world, the fuel for my over 40 plays comes from life itself, not by books about art/creativity. To be creative, you need to be inspired by life, to see how great works of art are composed, including nature. To understand life you need to focus intensely on it and observe how it works in as objective a way as possible. It’s great to find a book about creativity that will help your creativity, but I find life itself is the greatest inspiration.

As a graduate student during the late 1970s, my mentor, Martin Jay, generously introduced me to two members of the Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal. These memorable personal encounters inspired me to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin, who was closely allied with the Frankfurt School. The completed dissertation, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, became the first book on Benjamin in English and is still in print. The Frankfurt School thinkers published a series of pioneering socio-psychological treatises on political authoritarianism: The Authoritarian Personality, Prophets of Deceit, and One-Dimensional Man. These studies continue to provide an indispensable conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary reemergence of fascist political forms.

At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again. 

I’m a freelance science reporter and Contributing Writer at The New Yorker, with degrees in cognitive neuroscience and science writing. Growing up, I wanted to understand the fundamental nature of the universe—who doesn’t?!—and grew interested in physics, before realizing our only contact with outside reality (if it exists) is through consciousness. Today I cover psychology and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Can machines be conscious? I don’t know. Why does consciousness exist at all? I don’t know that either. But if there’s anything at all that’s magic in the universe, it’s consciousness.