91 Books Like Warming the Stone Child

I love this book and reread it often.

Why? Because it reassures me that I’m not alone in searching for greater peace of mind. Jon Kabat-Zinn combines stories from Buddhism and his own practice with humor and words of encouragement to remind me that it is up to me to wake up from the mindless rush of compulsive planning, worry, regret, and resentment that too often cycles through my mind like the voices on a talk radio station.

He also reminds me to be kind to myself, not to fall into shame or self-accusations, because mindfulness is an ongoing practice to become more centered, aware, and balanced.

I smile when I catch myself drifting away from being mindfully present, take a deep breath, and return to the here and now. And this process continues in my formal meditation practice each morning and my ongoing attempts to be more mindfully aware… show more.

I like Gottman’s scientific approach. I also liked his honesty about the challenges couples have to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive—the fact that most couples,  despite his workshop, nevertheless fail to do this when they get home.

That is, when they get home and the criticism appears, the wisdom disappears! This book helped launch my own personal efforts in my couples’ workshops to find a solution to this problem. 

I really appreciate the guidance this book offers for how to think about the ways people try to meet their need for love in relationships. It made me reflect not just on my own patterns for expressing and receiving love, but it offered a way for me to better understand others in my life.

Though it was written with romantic couples in mind, I have found that it can help with other relationships, too. When I have shared this book with patients, they have frequently found that it was an effective tool for providing insight and for helping to improve their love relationship. 

As someone who has read many books on attachment theory, I was taken in by how this book dealt with the topic. I loved how the visually appealing and humor-infused pages engaged my attention while also providing clear explanations of attachment theory and its related concepts. I also found the exercises to be thought-provoking.

Overall, the book’s focus on nurturing secure attachment and emotionally intimate relationships definitely resonated with me. 

This book is a history of American polar expeditions and their relationship with the Inuit who helped them survive the Arctic.

It is vividly written and balances both outsider and insider views of the Arctic, showing how different they can be, in an incredibly authentic way. It’s a sad book that stays with you for a long time.

I appreciate the genuine Inuit voice of this story of creation, so I researched the author.

Rumolt is active in the Inuit community and teaches elementary school there, but her education was started by her grandmother’s traditional tales. The book is in spare text in the tradition of the storyteller. The art is primarily black and white with touches of color, all the more welcome as a surprise.

In the end the story is about compromise and friendship and a beautiful introduction to a unit or theme of creation, seasons, or mythology. 

Perseverance, and an unwitting courage against all odds; that’s the essence of Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer.

Mowat’s book immortalizes a small band of Inuit as they traverse the barrens of Canada’s eastern Arctic, enduring starvation, punishing winter conditions, and a sociopolitical system bent on eradicating their five-thousand-year-old culture. This book shattered my perception about how I see myself as a Canadian, and injustices inflicted on indigenous peoples.

Written over seventy years ago, People of the Deer is testament to Mowat’s insight into a travesty that continues to this today, and tells me we still have a long way to go. 

Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier speaks with such authenticity as she calls for environmental justice that one can’t help but be moved. I found her story of growing up on the land in northern Quebec (Nunavik), raised by strong women, finding her voice, and becoming president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and later chair of the International Council deeply inspirational.

In those capacities, she focused on addressing both persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that become concentrated in the Arctic and global warming that threatens Inuit lives and lifeways by melting the ice. I also admire her use of her leadership role to call upon her people to reclaim their lives and destinies by drawing upon their traditional values to address the social problems that are threatening individual and community health.

What struck me most was the use of simple language to portray powerful intimacy and connection between human and animal, and by extension, environment. Murphy’s humorous dialogue, together with sparing, often ironic, descriptions, struck deep into my heart. The play starts in 1535 on an ice shelf up north—when an Inuk widow risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe, and adopts him. In the last scene five hundred years later in the oily waters of the Northwest Passage, the same bear—starving and cruelly injured by eco-tourists on a cruise ship—struggles to keep from drowning. No one on the ship cares. No one weeps for him. But I did. I wept for him and for his world destroyed by apathy. 

This is an unusual crime story set in Copenhagen, Denmark. It caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. The main character Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit scientist from Greenland, lonely and homesick in the big city. The death of an Inuit boy pulls her into a complex web of crime exposing Denmark’s complicated relationship with its protectorate Greenland. The title refers to the Inuit people’s understanding of their wintry habitat, and is a reminder of the threat to traditional lifestyles of many indigenous people. A thriller, but so much more.