Book Recommendations

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some Black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the 20th century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism were used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks.

Sabrina Strings argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fatphobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.

Eckhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle's clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who's ever wondered what exactly "living in the now" means.  Within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container--more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.

Using his scientist's eye and philosopher's heart, Zukav shows how infusing the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust makes them come alive with meaning and purpose. He illustrates how the emerging values of the spirit are changing marriages into spiritual partnerships, psychology into spiritual psychology, and transforming our everyday lives. The Seat of the Soul describes the remarkable journey to the spirit that each of us is on.

In The Energy of Prayer, Thich Nhat Hanh looks at the applications and effectiveness of prayer in Buddhist and other spiritual traditions and closely examines the question of why we pray. The Energy of Prayer introduces the reader to several meditation methods that re-envision prayer as an open, inclusive, and accessible practice that helps create healthy lives through the power of awareness and intention.

Even if you’re a decade or more away from menopause, your hormones may already be out of balance, usually caused by an excess of estrogen and a deficiency of progesterone. More than 50 million women experience premenopause symptoms.

Now Dr. John Lee—author of the groundbreaking What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause—teams up with women’s health expert Jesse Hanley, M.D., to bring you a revolutionary nonprescription “Balance Program” with simple, safe, and natural solutions for premenopause.

Millions of Americans are turning to herbal therapies to heal what ails them-either as an alternative or as a supplement to traditional medicine. From the most trusted name in natural healing, Phyllis A. Balch's new edition of Prescription for Herbal Healing provides the most current research and comprehensive facts in an easy-to-read A- to-Z format.

Hundreds of thousands of women have listened to Dr. Lee's potentially life-saving advice and followed his groundbreaking, natural hormone program-experiencing amazing results. Newly revised and updated, this revolutionary book has the latest research, and Dr. Lee's effective plan for restoring balance using bioidentical hormones, including natural progesterone.

Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced.