Our Recommended Reading List
Finding out what has
happened, and what is happening, on this planet :
Authors Peter Breggin and
Ginger Ross Breggin - 
Website
Our Recommended
Reading List
Finding out what has
happened, and what is happening, on this planet :
Authors Peter Breggin and
Ginger Ross Breggin -
Website
To find a combination of courage and sensitivity is rare these days, but to find it in two authors who are also articulate and enlightening seems like some sort of divine gift. Peter Breggin is the well-known pioneering psychiatrist, who challenged the psychiatric establishment in Toxic Psychiatry and Beyond Conflict and with Ginger Breggin took on the pharmaceutical industry in Talking Back to Prozac and Talking Back to Ritalin (a book so comprehensive about child-rearing that every parent should own it). With The War Against Children of Color, the Breggins exposed how mental health and government agencies are using invalid science for social control. Finally, Peter pioneered an alternative approach to therapeutic professions in The Heart of Being Helpful, in which he suggests moving from aggressive therapies ("verbal shock treatments," he calls them) to offering a "healing presence" to clients. The Breggins have written and continue to write other books, and our advice is: if their name is on a book, get it.
One of the pioneers of trauma theory, Sandra Bloom walks readers through her conversion from traditional psychiatrist to a healer creating safe spaces for her clients and herself to recover from trauma and rediscover their own creativity. Along the way, she realizes that for people to heal, society itself must change—a theme dear to our hearts and in all our books, though we discovered Sandra’s work only recently. Like all the pioneering therapists we mention here, this one, while expanding the mind, speaks from and to the heart.
When Patrick Carnes decided (in the 1980s) to tackle sex addiction, he didn’t realize how his life would change—and how many thousands of people he would help. His Out of the Shadows, Contrary to Love, and Don’t Call It Love opened a door for healing those whose response to their sexuality had ranged from compulsive to self-destructive. Through his many books, including the more recent Sexual Anorexia and The Betrayal Bond (about trauma bonding), Pat has brought a clarity to addictive behavior that is genuinely healing. Indeed, in his lectures all over the country, Pat says that he’d like to get all the healing professionals to talk to each other—so would we—and this outstanding scholar and therapist may be just the person to do it.
Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former Army Ranger who taught at West Point and now teaches military science at Arkansas State University, scarcely sounds like a candidate to challenge the increasing violence in our society—but this book does just that. In fact, its analysis of how people resist killing and how they are conditioned into killing represents an indictment against how our society is structured. Dave Grossman reveals how killing rates in war remained low in this and earlier centuries—around 15 to 20% (that is, eight out of ten combatants refused to kill another human being)—until the military began using methods that resemble a combination of contemporary video games, television programs, and films. If anyone every doubted that all of us (but especially our children) are being programmed into more and more violence—against our better nature—this is the book that will put those doubts to rest.
A brilliant writer and social critic, teacher and lecturer Alfie Kohn first came to our attention with his critique of competition, No Contest. In our first book, The Soul of Economies, we tried to save competition, and Alfie Kohn became a footnote. Then we read his book and realized (and said so in a letter to him) that he was right and we were wrong. Now we feature him prominently in our books, and we build on everything he has written: his dismantling of carrot-and-stick systems in Punished by Rewards and Beyond Discipline, his analysis of education in What to Look for in a Classroom, and his exploration of altruism in The Brighter Side of Human Nature. Reading Alfie Kohn is both a treat and a mind-stretch, and who can ask for more than that?
After her first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller researched child-rearing methods in the book now considered a child-advocacy classic, For Your Own Good. Her uncompromising look at European and American social systems in all her books (at least six at last count) provided an important foundation for our work—and she always reminds us to face the truth about what’s really happening to children today.
Long a rebel in psychology, Anne Schaef, like Alice Miller in Europe, has referred to herself as "a recovering psychologist"—and her books reveal why. In Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science, she exposes the dysfunctionality of traditional psychology and offers an alternative, which is pursued in Living in Process. Her earlier books, especially When Society Becomes an Addict, provided a grounding for our book, The Paradigm Conspiracy, while her later books have added traditional spiritual teachings to her ideas about healing and therapy.
Like Thomas Paine during the American Revolution, Val Valerian is an uncompromising truth-teller about what’s really going on in our society—and he plays a similar role in awakening the public. The difference is that instead of Paine’s essays, Val offers a vast range of resources—from scholarly papers to reports from around the world about phenomena the press ignores—to allow readers to explore the roots of everything from behind-the-scenes political events to the nature of consciousness. In both the Matrix books, books published by associates and the Leading Edge International Research Journal he edits (see www.trufax.org for ordering), he brings a brilliant intellect and investigative genius to his wide-ranging research—from which we his readers benefit as we’re encouraged to consider different viewpoints and to make up our own minds. And how often does that happen?
Suddenly and encouragingly, we have resources for using language to talk to each other. In the last decade or so, excellent conflict resolution books have turned up, such as Dudley Weeks’ The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution and Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes. There have also been books reflecting on how we use language, exemplified by Deborah Tannen’s work as she moved from That’s Not What I Said and You Just Don’t Understand (about the differences between male and female language styles) to The Argument Culture. In 1999, two books appeared on bookstore shelves that can help us transform language from passing judgments and attacking each other to real communication:
Counselor and mediator Marshall Rosenberg offers clear steps for genuinely engaging with other people. His "language of compassion" skills can change the way we all talk to each other and help us eliminate misunderstanding. Like the Stone-Patton-Heen work, this book sensitizes us to each other and (remarkably) to our own needs and feelings as we interact with other people. The mere appearance of a book such as this shows that we’re on a healing path that can lead to a very different, more peaceful future, and reading it can give you hope.
Following their mentor Roger Fisher, the Stone-Patton-Heen trio has written a book that gives practical skills for dealing with, yes, difficult conversations—and it’s wonderful. The book is clearly written, gives excellent examples, and organizes skills for converting tough discussions into learning conversations. As Denise said when she read it, reading it is like a weight lifting from your shoulders, because you now know how to deal with even the most challenging interactions. Like Marshall Rosenberg’s book, we’d issue this one to everybody on the planet if we could.
Many of the authors cited elsewhere have a great deal good to say about these subjects: Peter and Ginger Breggin, David Grossman, Alfie Kohn, Alice Miller, and Val Valerian. In addition, there are many authors whose work on education we have admired over the years, including pioneers Maria Montessori and John Holt and writers such as Thomas Armstrong, Thom Hartman, and Randy Rolfe. Here, we’d like to highlight a few books that may get lost in the shuffle:
This book was originally titled Babies Remember Birth, and yes, they do. They also hear our thoughts, send us telepathic messages, and resent being treated as just a dumb body. David Chamberlain’s research will change the way you think about who children really are and, like the animal books below, will offer a glimpse of a universe more conscious and interconnected than most of us suspect.
When award-winning teacher John Gatto decided to tell the truth about education, much of the educational establishment and a lot of parents were listening. John has written other books, but this slim volume (a fast and great read for anyone who’s ever been to school) forced responses from educators and social commentators (editorials even appeared in major newsmagazines). The gauntlet had been thrown down. Now, we hope that parents and teachers continue to challenge assumptions about how children learn—and continue to read John’s other books.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to school (hadn’t Congress gotten all up in arms about corporal punishment in schools in the middle of the twentieth century and passed a bunch of laws?), along comes Temple University Professor Irwin Hyman to remind us that passing laws is one thing; getting bullying teachers and administrators.to stop abusing children is another. All of us have encountered these types; in among the conscientious, overworked and underpaid educators are the abusers, hiding under the cloak of "discipline." The case that forms the centerpiece of the book (an assistant principal-coach paddling an honor student hard enough to create lifelong physical damage) is just one that will make you wonder who in the world let these people have anything to do with children. But Hyman does more: he documents the plague of violence in our schools, in the face of which (this book was written before the famous shooting events of the late 1990s) student counterviolence becomes almost predictable. This is a wake-up call about ideas of "discipline" in schools that we ignore at our children’s peril.
The grandfather of all animal books, Allen Boone’s account can open readers to higher dimensions of connectiveness, as his work with the film dog Strongheart and other animals did for Allen himself. This book resembles nothing more than a trip to another world, a gentler one in which we’re all in this together, humans and animals.
Bill Schul’s books are full of interesting accounts—though we’re afraid the superb Animal Immortality is out of print. We can only hope that it comes back into print, because his stories of what animals are capable of are astonishing and mind-stretching.
Okay, this book is just plain fun — as well as enlightening. It’s one thing to have the household dog or cat risk his or her life to save Joey or Janey or Mom or Dad—but a rat saving someone? a pig saving someone? a shark? a stingray? This is a real eye-opener about how many of us are being rescued by creatures we’ve haven’t always treated very well.
We’ll continue to add books to these and other categories, so please keep checking in here.