Books like The Horse Boy — picked by fans

As a neuroscientist and horse trainer, my twin lifelong passions are horses and brains. I’ve learned along the way that most people are fascinated by both topics when rendered in plain language, regardless of whether they’ve ever touched a horse or inspected a brain. I worked on horses and brains separately for most of my life. But combining these two passions changed everything, allowing me to apply neuroscience to form a deep insight of the animal I’ve always loved most. I also enjoy translating equine life to those outside it, so everyone can get a stronger understanding of the minds, bodies, and hearts of these magnificent prey animals.

As a neuroscientist and horse trainer, my twin lifelong passions are horses and brains. I’ve learned along the way that most people are fascinated by both topics when rendered in plain language, regardless of whether they’ve ever touched a horse or inspected a brain. I worked on horses and brains separately for most of my life. But combining these two passions changed everything, allowing me to apply neuroscience to form a deep insight of the animal I’ve always loved most. I also enjoy translating equine life to those outside it, so everyone can get a stronger understanding of the minds, bodies, and hearts of these magnificent prey animals.

As a neuroscientist and horse trainer, my twin lifelong passions are horses and brains. I’ve learned along the way that most people are fascinated by both topics when rendered in plain language, regardless of whether they’ve ever touched a horse or inspected a brain. I worked on horses and brains separately for most of my life. But combining these two passions changed everything, allowing me to apply neuroscience to form a deep insight of the animal I’ve always loved most. I also enjoy translating equine life to those outside it, so everyone can get a stronger understanding of the minds, bodies, and hearts of these magnificent prey animals.

As a neuroscientist and horse trainer, my twin lifelong passions are horses and brains. I’ve learned along the way that most people are fascinated by both topics when rendered in plain language, regardless of whether they’ve ever touched a horse or inspected a brain. I worked on horses and brains separately for most of my life. But combining these two passions changed everything, allowing me to apply neuroscience to form a deep insight of the animal I’ve always loved most. I also enjoy translating equine life to those outside it, so everyone can get a stronger understanding of the minds, bodies, and hearts of these magnificent prey animals.

My passion and subsequent expertise in this subject have followed years of self-study and reading. I have tried to make sense of the conflicting views that the world has thrown at me, confusing me by each claiming to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (the seller's marketplace). The books in this series, reflect how difficult it is to be yourself and how much courage it takes to break free of your conditioning, parental or societal. It covers the necessary breakdown of the internal personality, so that a new you can emerge from the cocoon of the reassembled old you, butterfly-like.

I discovered cannabis as good medicine in 2009, when my gynecologist recommended it for severe dysmenorrhea. When I couldn’t find a cookbook offering healthy, sophisticated cannabis-infused recipes, I decided to write one. As an amazing group of cannabis chefs taught me how to cook with cannabis and shared their recipes, I fell in love with the plant as well as the open-hearted community that supports it. I followed the Cannabis Kitchen Cookbook, published in 2015, with Pot in Pans: A History of Eating Cannabis, a textbook tracing the plant’s culinary history to ancient Persian and India, in 2019. I’ve learned how to grow my own, and I write regularly about cannabis trends and liberation.

As an equipment operator for the Army Corps of Engineers, I didn’t serve in a “combat” role, per se, but the engineers go wherever the military needs things built, so we were often repairing IED damage, hauling supplies outside the wire, or fortifying bases so the infantry, cavalry, etc. could do their job effectively. Coming home, I owe a lot of my successful reintegration to my writing and the many people who encouraged me to share it with the world. Now with my Master of Arts in English, I’ve taught college courses on military culture, and I present for veteran art groups, writing workshops, and high schools and colleges around the country.

I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.   

I'm an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. I grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. In 2010, I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2 Disorder but I now believe that I’ve struggled with the disorder since childhood. I'm a novelist, poet, short fiction writer, and filmmaker. I've won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction.

My father, a college professor, sought mental health help during a difficult period—and got forcibly electroshocked. I later started doing journalism, investigating community issues such as poverty, government and business, racial conflicts, policing, and protests—wherever I looked, I’d find sources who’d been subjected to psychiatric detentions. I started to see that a far greater diversity of people were being affected than we normally realize or talk about. Over the ensuing years, I interviewed hundreds of people about their experiences of forced psychiatric interventions, and became determined to shine a brighter public light on mental health law powers. My articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards.