Welcome to our book club! Here you will find a list of books we’ve read and find helpful along with a short description. There will be one book per month with a short description of its contents. We will try to find and include free PDF’s to the books listed but may not be able to find them for all. Check your local library for book availability.
FEBRUARY 2024
Don’t Let it Get You Down
Savala Nolan
Savala Nolan explores her relationship with her body, race, and womanhood in Don’t Let it Get You Down. She illustrates how she feels living in liminality and finding the power in it and her journey to overcoming her need for validation from people born into more privileged spaces in society over her, be it white people, men, and the like. Her raw storytelling detailing the good, the bad, and the ugly makes this work a compelling read keeping you plugged in until the end.
JANUARY 2024
Toxic Parents
Susan Forward, Ph.D.
Toxic Parents is a necessary resource for anybody who has had abusive parents of all kinds. Susan Forward, Ph.D., takes the reader’s hand throughout their healing journey while unpacking their parent’s impact by not sugar-coating the reader’s experiences, encouraging the reader to place responsibility back onto their parents instead of continuing to blame themselves for their abuse, and encourages and validates the readers feelings that they might have buried, been ashamed of, or felt guilty for having towards their experiences and their parents. For those who don’t feel like being told that they need to forgive their parents as a necessary step in their healing will find solace in Forward’s insistence that forgiveness can actually be detrimental to the healing process rather than helpful. Although the content is not sunshine and rainbows, Forward inserts words of comfort and validation throughout which makes reading about this often painful subject matter a bit less painful.
DECEMBER
Humble
Daryl Van Tongeren, Ph.D.
As our society seemingly gets more and more narcissistic and uncivil, we need a book like Humble to help us be just that, humble. Daryl Van Tongeren, Ph.D. lays out a guide to practicing humility and the benefits, from personal to professional, of implementing more humility. A gentle and uplifting look at the good prosociality can do and how achievable it is, gives hope for the future and motivates one to do better. Tongeren asserts that humility is achieved not in conflict with security in one’s worthiness and competence, but is actually absolutely aligned with security in realistic assessments of self-worth and knowledgeability. But humility can not be truly embodied if it is in endorsement of superiority/inferiority complexes in interpersonal spaces.
August
The Myth of Normal
Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté
The Myth of Normal is a sobering yet gentle guide to how to reconnect with oneself and the world. Gabor Maté invites us to look at ourselves and look at our surroundings, our social, political, and economic environment, in order to open us up to our possibilities in healing. Healing, as is defined in the book, is about approaching wholeness, rather than “curing”. This wholeness, within oneself and amongst each other, is possible and necessary for our own well-being and the well-being of the larger global community we belong to. We absolutely have an effect on each other, and breaking down the social dislocation amongst us is necessary to remedy all the world’s ailments. We need to investigate what our ailments, be it personal, community-wide, and/or global, are telling us, what purpose they serve, and to use them as vehicles on our journey to wholeness. To do this, we must break down illusions, stand strong through disillusionment to see things as they are, and to find agency in how we move forward, armed with this awareness and the opportunity it provides us.
July
Raising Multiracial Children
Farzana Nayani
Farzana Nayani’s book Raising Multiracial Children is a vital resource for anyone who is navigating multiraciality and/or anyone who wishes to help another, be it being the parent or the teacher of someone who is multiracial. “This book is dedicated to all who are devoted to advancing inclusion, belonging, and understanding for multiracial children and their families” (Nayani, xv). There are helpful exercises to do oneself, with your child, or with students throughout the book, and helpful resources and suggestions listed throughout each chapter. It not only discusses multiracial identity, but also helps guide the reader to help develop one’s own identity and how to help others to do so by starting at an accessible ground zero and branching out to wider community resources. Nayani also includes helpful advice about how to help a child bridge the gap from navigating multiraciality in childhood into adulthood by illustrating how to find community in higher education and beyond as they build their careers.
JUNE
Traumatized
Kati Morton, LMFT
In Traumatized: Identify, Understand, and Cope with PTSD and Emotional Stress Kati Morton, LMFT, advocates for treatment of trauma to be focused and molded around the unique needs of each patient, rather than molding the patient to textbook diagnoses and treatment approaches. She offers fresh and updated takes on methods of treatment based on current research and values, including discussing Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, C-PTSD. She marries textbook knowledge with empathy and encouragement that offers an airtight approach to understanding and treating traumatized individuals. Easy to read, uplifting, and realistically positive.
MAY
The Deepest Well
Nadine Burke Harris, M.D.
The Deepest Well:Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity documents Nadine Burke Harris’ M.D. efforts to advocate for ACE, Adverse Childhood Experiences, screening as a necessary part of medical evaluations of patients to promote better future health outcomes. Harris, a doctor herself, founded the Center for Youth Wellness in the Bayview Hunter’s Point district of San Francisco, known for being an area consisting of a population that is generally severely disadvantaged and disenfranchised, and therefore exposed to high levels of childhood adversity. However, Harris emphasizes that ACEs are not accumulated amongst just the poorest of people, but any child, regardless of zip code and socioeconomic status, can also be exposed to high levels of ACEs as well. ACEs happen to everyone, and can have long-lasting health consequences if not screened and treated for as early as possible, as the more ACEs one has, the more susceptible they are to having negative health outcomes in the future.
APRIL
Unmasking Autism
Devon Price
In Unmasking Autism, Devon Price, PhD, unpacks what it means to mask as an Autistic individual and the toll it takes on their mental and physical energetic reserves. They argue that radical acceptance and embodiment of being Autistic is the way to change public, legal, and political perceptions of Autistic people and other people who are neurodivergent or otherwise disabled. Masking is a necessary survival mechanism for Autistic people to survive in an ableist world that is catered towards neurotypical people, therefore unmasking does still come with its own set of dangers. Price makes comparisons between unmasking and “coming out of the closet” as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and the fear of stigma and physical dangers that it can come with. But, if one finds and/or builds the right support system and the right tribe, Autistic people can begin to thrive and demand better from social, economic, and political systems by living unapologetically as themselves.
MARCH (2)
When Someone You Know Has Depression
Susan J. Noonan, M.D., M.P.H.
When Someone You Know Has Depression is a great supplemental guide for those who are helping loved ones cope with depression. It includes similar information to Managing Your Depression, but focuses on educating family members, friends, and other figures of significance to the individual with depression in how to best position themselves, armed with knowledge and perspective, to be of the best support for the depressed individual.
MARCH (1)
Managing Your Depression
Susan J. Noonan, M.D., M.P.H.
This month in Book Club we’re focusing on depression. Managing Your Depression is a great and easy-to-understand guide to understanding your depression. Susan J. Noonan details actionable steps to handle and heal your depression. Included in the book are helpful worksheets throughout that help you get acquainted with yourself and your depression. This book strikes a good balance between being informative and being an interactive workbook to guide you on your journey of coping with depression to recovery.
FEBRUARY
Believing
Anita Hill
In honor of Black History Month, this month’s selection is Believing, by Anita Hill. Believing is an excellent survey of gender-based violence and how it is not simply an individual issue, but rather a society-wide issue. Hill unpacks the privilege of who gets to deny others the consideration of there being an issue and who it affects. Throughout the book, Hill illustrates how gender-based violence is not just a women’s issue, but one that affects nearly everyone. A must-read about gender-based violence that anyone, regardless of how well-educated they are on the topic, can gain nuggets of knowledge and wisdom from. Hill is a professor of Law and more at Brandeis University.
JANUARY
Molecules of Emotion
Candace B. Pert, PhD
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine reads like an exciting action movie that documents a scientist’s quest to find the existence of and locate the opiate receptor in the brain. Candace B. Pert PhD, the Rosalind Franklin of the opiate receptor, used the antagonist naloxone to successfully locate the opiate receptor on October 25th, 1972. This finding helped prove the connection between the mind and the body during a time when it was thought that each behaved separately from and independently of one another. This fueled further research into emotional bases for diseases, like AIDS. The book also shows how difficult it is for scientists, particularly those that are women, who want to do honest research have to battle egos and sexism along the way, and may not even get due credit for their work.