Here are 100 books that The Story of San Michele fans have personally recommended if you like
The Story of San Michele.
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My late husband Brian Barraclough (1933-2025), on whose behalf I have compiled this book list, had a great interest in medical history. He carried out research on many distinguished doctors from the 19th and 20th centuries, and prepared talks and publications about their lives. Brian came from New Zealand, had a long career in academic and clinical psychiatry in the UK, and returned to New Zealand after he retired. The two of us often worked together on our respective writing projects, and I edited and published the text of his autobiography after he died.
A long, complex, fascinating, and deeply personal book.
Jung (1875-1961), who departed from Freudian theory to develop the therapeutic system of Analytical Psychology, was a mystic who wrote more about his own complex inner life than outside events, discussing psychospiritual concepts such as mythology, the collective unconscious, and the archetypes.
He experienced visions, including a vivid near-death experience. Many of his beliefs resonate with the more modern “New Age” movement.
'I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals' Carl Jung
An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings.
In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that book, composed of conversations with his colleague and friend Aniela Jaffe, as well as chapters written in his own hand, and other…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
My late husband Brian Barraclough (1933-2025), on whose behalf I have compiled this book list, had a great interest in medical history. He carried out research on many distinguished doctors from the 19th and 20th centuries, and prepared talks and publications about their lives. Brian came from New Zealand, had a long career in academic and clinical psychiatry in the UK, and returned to New Zealand after he retired. The two of us often worked together on our respective writing projects, and I edited and published the text of his autobiography after he died.
My list would not be complete without this impressively long and detailed biography of Freud (1856–1939), the “father of psychoanalysis.”
Freud is the most famous psychiatrist who ever lived and is still a household name, even though his theories and methods of therapy have only a limited place in psychiatric practice today.
This book would be essential reading for serious scholars of psychiatric history, but I admit I couldn’t get through all of it myself, and I know that Brian couldn’t either.
An analytical biography of the precursor of psychoanalysis and famous neurologist, which reveals his childhood, courtship and marriage, career, ill health and death from cancer. Bibliogs
My late husband Brian Barraclough (1933-2025), on whose behalf I have compiled this book list, had a great interest in medical history. He carried out research on many distinguished doctors from the 19th and 20th centuries, and prepared talks and publications about their lives. Brian came from New Zealand, had a long career in academic and clinical psychiatry in the UK, and returned to New Zealand after he retired. The two of us often worked together on our respective writing projects, and I edited and published the text of his autobiography after he died.
Brian and I once met Anthony Clare (1942-2097), who was a multitalented, charismatic, and controversial Irish doctor.
Well known for interviewing many famous people in his BBC Radio 4 program In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, and for his book Psychiatry In Dissent, he was also a prominent clinician, researcher, administrator, political activist, and the father of seven children. He died suddenly from a heart attack at age 64.
This is a readable, factual account of his life and career.
Born in Dublin in 1942, Anthony Clare was the best-known psychiatrist of his generation. His BBC Radio 4 show, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, which ran from 1982 to 2001, brought him international fame and changed the nature of broadcast interviews forever. Famous interviewees included Stephen Fry, Anthony Hopkins, Spike Milligan, Maya Angelou, and Jimmy Saville, each of whom yielded to Clare’s inimitable gentle yet probing style. Clare made unique contributions to the demystification and practice of psychiatry, most notably through his classic book Psychiatry in Dissent: Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice (1976). This book, the first, official biography of…
What hope does an army of children have against the might of the Mamluks?
Brother Foulques de Villaret just wants to stay in Acre and perform his sworn duties. Instead, the young Hospitaller Knight of Saint John must undertake a dangerous journey from the Holy Land to a remote village…
My late husband Brian Barraclough (1933-2025), on whose behalf I have compiled this book list, had a great interest in medical history. He carried out research on many distinguished doctors from the 19th and 20th centuries, and prepared talks and publications about their lives. Brian came from New Zealand, had a long career in academic and clinical psychiatry in the UK, and returned to New Zealand after he retired. The two of us often worked together on our respective writing projects, and I edited and published the text of his autobiography after he died.
Irvin Yalom (1931-), still alive aged 94, is an “existential psychiatrist” best known for his work on group psychotherapy and also as the author of many fiction and non-fiction books. He tells his life story through a series of short chapters, often drawing parallels between his patients’ problems and his own experience growing up as the son of poor Jewish immigrants to America.
In his later career, he introduced ideas from both Western and Eastern philosophy into his practice.
'I was born in Washington, DC, June 13, 1931, of parents who immigrated from Russia shortly after the first world war. Home was the inner city of Washington - a small apartment atop my parents' grocery store on First and Seaton Street. During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor, black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge and, twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies'.
I am an academic and writer based in the UK. I have always wondered why capitalism claims to know the price of everything but the costs of nothing, unless it gets in the way of increased profit. I have been puzzling over gender inequalities in the political economy of our global society for many years now. This is not only an academic interest but a personal one; the rich buy in the labour of others and the poor get depleted more and faster. I wonder what our world would feel like if this labour of life-making was equally distributed, and valued as it should be.
This book shook up the debate on domestic work and the place of women in society.
Da la Costa and James put forward the radical idea that the working class must include non-waged workers in the home, most of whom are women. This was a revolutionary idea which brought to light how the work of women is overlooked in society and the economy. Wages for housework were their symbolic and material answer to this, and this generated a huge debate about how the modern family was created by the development of capitalism, with the care labour of women being a subsidy to capital.
When I first read this book, I felt as if a whole new way of thinking about women’s work had been opened up.
A superb introduction to the prospect of opening our idea of the working class to include non-waged workers, specifically women who work in the home. A simple idea with profound revolutionary consequences. If the workers of the world are not all in the factory, and are not all men, where does that leave us?
During Covid, I gave myself the Story-a-Month Challenge. I started a story on the first day of each month and stopped on the last day. A subconscious theme emerged: the struggles of grown people and their parents, done fantastically. By year’s end, I had twelve stories, placed in magazines somewhere. I collected them, adding earlier stories, longer and with younger protagonists, but with the same theme of arrested development. I called the book “Adult Children,” a wry reference to offspring of alcoholics (I am one). Also subconscious: my inspiration from other authors of fantastical collections, some of whom I’ve included here.
Unlike those of Richard Matheson, the stories of Italo Calvino are rarely adapted for stage or screen, his estate holding a heavy hand on the rights (I know—I’ve tried).
One of my favorite writers, Calvino specializes in eccentric, surreal stories as funny as they are moving.
Cosmicomics is a linked collection, each tale an imaginative fiction about the origins of a scientific idea, from the Big Bang (the narrator lives in a crazily cramped space with his family during the explosion) to evolution (his embarrassing old uncle still lives in the sea and refuses to make the trip to land). These stories combine whimsicality and gravity as few others do.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature,…
Often, historians choose their field or specialty, but sometimes, the field chooses the historian. Being a historian of southern Italy, the land of my ancestors reflects far more than a merely academic interest. As a personal pursuit, it isn’t just what I am but who I am. I write the kind of books that I wish had existed when I wrote my first peer-reviewed article in 1984. This has come to include everything from general histories to specialised studies to translations of medieval chronicles. Through the website Best of Sicily, online since 1999, my work has reached a readership of millions over the course of two decades.
Historical fiction, when well-researched, sometimes brings us uncommon insight into people and their times. This is one of those rare cases.
Very little has been written in English about Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples and Sicily (later the Two Sicilies) as the consort of Ferdinando I de Bourbon, except in dynastic histories such as those of Harold Acton.
In the absence of a major biography, I recommend this book as a worthy introduction, tracing the queen’s steps and considering her actions as the power behind the throne.
As Marie Antoinette took her last breath as Queen of France in Paris, another formidable monarch-Antoinette's dearly beloved sister, Charlotte-was hundreds of miles away, in Naples, fighting desperately to secure her release from the revolutionaries who would take her life. Little did Charlotte know, however, that her sister's execution would change the course of history-and bring about the end of her own empire.
"You are the queen. You are the queen that Antoinette wanted to be."
Austria 1767: Maria Carolina Charlotte-tenth daughter and one of sixteen children of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-knows her position as a Habsburg archduchess will…
I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.
Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is…
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues…
From Taylor Swift to Lauryn Hill, from Joan Baez to Beyonce, I find that the lyrics, performances, and melodies of women making music inspire my own creativity every day. I am not a musician; I am a writer, editor, and novelist! But I find music to be so accessible, so deeply meaningful, in a way that other art forms, even my own, are not. So naturally, I adore novels about music!
I return to this book in my mind again and again, and quote it all the time! It’s a slim, sexy, romantic, philosophical novel set against the backdrop of a British woman’s eye (and heart)-opening trip to Italy.
At first, young Lucy Honeychurch plays the piano with unbridled passion and lives somewhat timidly. But with a little bit of love, and some beauty, can that change?
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence, Italy, with her cousin and they were assured they would receive a room with a view of the River Arno, but instead are given a room overlooking a dull courtyard. A one Mr. Emerson and his son George offer their room, which as the desirable view, to the two ladies. From this opening sequence, A Room with a View sets off following young Lucy as she navigates through…
A tragicomic novel about the toxic relationship between two couples who first met at medical school and whose paths cross again many years later.
Charlotte is married to Henry, a retired consultant pathologist. She abandoned her own medical training after a harrowing experience left her emotionally…
The books I recommend have stayed with me years after I read them. I’ve always been fascinated by my Jewish heritage and the rich traditions of my forebearers. I’ve incorporated some of that heritage in my own work as an author. Most recently, I published a historical novel about the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, which took me down a rabbit hole of research into Jewish literature. I revisited books I’d loved for decades and discovered new books I loved.
I was captivated by this epic tale of Grazia dei Rossi, secretary to the powerful wife of the Pope’s physician and the daughter of a powerful banker.
The book gave me a fascinating peek into Jewish life in Renaissance Italy as Grazia struggles between the temptations of Christian life and the pull of her Jewish heritage.
A sweeping saga of intrigue and romance set during the Italian Renaissance and told through the eyes of Grazia dei Rossi, a young Jewish woman torn between duty and forbidden romance, who wins our hearts with her recorded secrets of love.
Grazia dei Rossi, private secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d’Este, is the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the pope’s Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince. In a “secret book,” written as a legacy for her son, she records her struggles to choose between the seductions of the Christian world and a return…
