Book Recs Wanted for my bookshop

[rachelmanija]

1. Books on autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurodiversity. They can be either general or geared toward self-help.

Criteria: 1) MODERN! They should ideally have been published within the last five years. 2) Written for laypeople, not scientists or medical professionals. 3) NOT looking for pure memoirs like "my life as an autistic person," though elements of memoir are fine.

2. Books on human behavior/neuropsychology that are NOT self-help - think Oliver Sacks, except not actually by Oliver Sacks.

Criteria: 1) Not by Oliver Sacks, V. S. Ramachandran, Atul Gawande, or Robert Sapolsky as I already know about them, but that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of. 2) MODERN! Ideally, published within the last five years. 3) Not bullshit, woo-woo, or otherwise totally unsupported by any factual evidence, I'm looking at you Julian Jaynes. 4) Not right-wing or misogynistic. No "evolutionary biology says women evolved to be sex slaves."

How are Sapolsky's more recent books like Behave? I've only read Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

3. Mind-expanding biology books for laypeople. Like Ed Yong and Siddhartha Mukherjee's books, but not by them as I already know about them.

For all of these, I would particularly like books written by women if there's any suitable.

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Personally, I found Bruce Perry's The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog life-changing. It was published 20 years ago, but looks like there was a third edition in 2017. I should check that out and see if anything meaningful changes...

Have you read it or are you familiar with the author's work? I have no idea if his therapeutic techniques work on a practical level, but on a theoretical level, it all made sense to me.

Content warning for child harm: it's a book about extreme cases of childhood trauma!

[rachelmanija]

Good rec. I already have it in the shop. ;)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Good taste!

[graydon]

Biology books for lay people:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-evolution-is-ernst-mayr/1118881174

This is the person credited with the biological species concept, writing for lay people near the end of a long life. Probably the best introduction to the Modern Synthesis of evolution you can get.

NOT written for the layperson (but fascinating and important if chewy), Mary Jane West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. A major synthesis comparable to Origin and why nigh-all the popular science takes on evolution are actively wrong. (and why Dawkins specifically is so very, very wrong.) Anybody who gets through it will get their mind blown.

https://academic.oup.com/book/40908

[rachelmanija]

Thank you! I might get the latter just for me, it sounds fascinating.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, 2010.

[rydra_wong]

I haven't read it but have heard great things!

[helen_keeble]

Now there’s a title that hits VERY differently in 2025…

I’ve read this and recall it being good, though I don’t remember if it has anything to say (inclusive or otherwise) about trans women. A quick google suggests that it doesn’t, and that while the book is occasionally misappropriated by TERFs, the author herself isn’t TERFy.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I haven't read it since it came out, but I don't remember any trans discussion, either.

[sovay]

3. Mind-expanding biology books for laypeople.

Off the top of my head and in order of recentness: Amorina Kingdon's Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater (2024), Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020), Susan Hand Shetterly's Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water's Edge (2018), and Richard O. Prum's The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017).

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! I only have Entangled Life already (and have sold multiple copies.)

[sovay]

Thanks! I only have Entangled Life already (and have sold multiple copies.)

You're welcome! (I'm very happy to hear it about Entangled Life.)

[watersword]

Mary Roach is an extremely fun science writer. I am currently reading Zoe Schlanger's The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (2024), which might suit.

[ioplokon]

Haven't read it, but Biological Exuberance has been on my to-read list for a while.

[ermingarden]

Oooh, for #1 I’d recommend anything by Kay Redfield Jamison! Fires in the Dark: Healing the Mind, the Oldest Branch of Medicine is from 2023, so it meets your five-year threshold. (I also particularly love Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament; it’s from 1993 but it holds up well, and honestly it really helped me think about my own bipolar diagnosis in a new way, although it’s aimed at a general audience and not specifically at people with bipolar disorder. And of course An Unquiet Mind is what she’s most famous for, but that’s a memoir.)

[rivkat]

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. And maybe Hope Jahren, Lab Girl?

[radiantfracture]

And Godfrey-Smith has a new book out, Metazoa.

[rydra_wong]

Currently in a "revised and updated" 6th edition rather than fully modern, but The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children by Ross Greene would have saved me a fair amount of trauma if my parents had had it when I was a kid.

[julian]

Huh, I'll have to look for that. Thank you.

[zana16]

Seconding this - an excellent and lifesaving book!

[rmc28]

I second this, pretty sure I read it on your recommendation Rydra! Very helpful for learning how to do better by my children.

[zana16]

On autism, it’s a memoir, but I found Forever Boy to be the most helpful thing I read when my kid was diagnosed.

[em_h]

None of these are new but (in category 1, dealing with schizophrenia) Jay Neugeboren's "Imagining Robert" and Rosemary Radford Reuther's "Many Forms of Madness." Andrew Sullivan's "Noonday Demon" remains a bit of a classic dealing with severe depression.

Going back to your previous question about philosophy, Martha Nussbaum got a bunch of mentions but I don't think her "Frontiers of Justice" was specifically named, and it's a good one.

[shadaras]

Unmasking Autism, by Devon Price! Really lovely look at autism in general and how autism and gender interrelate in specific. Written by an autistic trans man. Not a memoir, though obviously contains reflective elements (using himself as one case study among many).

[yatima]

Was coming to recommend this. Also in biology, more or less: Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, Lisa Kaltenegger's Alien Earths, Sarah Stewart Johnson's Sirens of Mars, Riley Black's Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Susan Casey's The Underworld and Erika Howsare's The Age of Deer.

[cyanmnemosyne]

I've heard a lot of good things about Unmasking Autism! Sadly haven't read it myself yet, though.

[black_bentley]

On ADHD, I really like Kat Brown's It's Not a Bloody Trend: Understanding Life as an ADHD Adult. It only came out last year, and as someone who was diagnosed at 34 I've found it really helpful. And How to Keep House While Drowning by K.C. Davis reduced me to tears (in an oh my god this book gets it way).

[dancesontrains]

Seconding 'How To Keep House While Drowning', I keep my own copy next to my bed.

[dhampyresa]

I have like How to keep house while drowning a lot.

two biology books

[redbird]

Dark and Magical Places: the Neuroscience of Navigation, by Christopher Kemp. It has some memoirish bits, but mostly along the lines of comparing what a scientist told him with his own experience.

The Light Eaters: how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth, by Zoë Schlanger, is mind-blowing, and the author notes that some of it, including the use of the word "intelligence" here, is controversial.

[starlady]

Josh L. Davis, A Little Queer Natural History. Davis is a science writer by trade so it's pretty accessibly written, and it's illustrated.

Not sure if schizophrenia falls under your wishlist for neuropsychology, but Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker is very good.

[wychwood]

3 - Robin Wall Kimmerer might fit? Most people really love Braiding Sweetgrass but personally the one that blew my mind was Gathering Moss which is specifically about moss.

Also tbh I still really love David Attenborough and the original Life trilogy books have been updated in recent years to incorporate genetic information etc.

[leaina]

1. Sadie Dingfelder's Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination is partly memoir but also about various kinds of neurodiversity in general.

2. Charan Ranganath, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters - despite the subtitle, not at all self-help-y; the author is a psychologist/neuroscientist writing for a general audience.

[landofnowhere]

I read Neurotribes (2015) by Steve Silberman last year, and I'm of two minds as to whether to recommend it. It is a book-long answer to the question of "why are there so many autistic people these days?", and as such is it as much about the question of how society sees people on the autism spectrum as about autism itself -- it is not an #ownvoices book, and it also predates the modern recognition of women wih autism. But there are people for whom it would be helpful.

[crystalpyramid]

I appreciated reading Spectrums: Autistic Transgender People in Their Own Words. Maxfield Sparrow, 2020, but possibly hard to find.

[slashmarks]

Re: biology books, I read Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace by Carl Safina and enjoyed it; it's about culture in different animal species.

[hannah]

Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree" isn't recent, and would still qualify for the second one.

[daidoji_gisei]

I might be stretching the boundaries of biology here, but this book blew open parts of my brain. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art , by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. On the biology side it covers a lot of what was can know (or reasonably expect) about what the Neanderthals ate and how much they would have needed to fuel their very active lifestyles. And a whole lot about what we can learn from modern genetic data.

As a bonus, also includes a metric butt-ton of information about Neanderthal engineering and material science. These people were amazing.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, that sounds good for the shop and excellent for me personally.

[anna_wing]

Darren Naish has some rather fun popular science books on palaeontology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Naish

[cyanmnemosyne]

For ADHD, Jessica McCabe's How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It) just came out last year and I loved it. She is not herself a psychologist/psychiatrist/neuroscientist (the book spawned from her YouTube channel of the same name), but IIRC she worked with several to make sure that the neuroscience discussion in the book was useful and accurate, and there's a lot of discussion of how different aspects of ADHD "feel" to people who have it (anecdotes from herself and others) + toolbox tips and tricks.

I personally found it much more to my tastes than the other ADHD book I read last year -- ADHD 2.0, by Ned Hallowell and John Ratey, which just barely skates in under the 5-year limit. :) It had more extensive neuroscience discussions and I did get some good information from it, but also "felt" dated in how it talked about ADHD -- lots of "it's a superpower! and also a curse!" that's just ... I know that sort of rhetoric is empowering for some people but I liked How To ADHD's overall vibe better.

Both IMO are good resources if you're hurting for other recommendations (ADHD 2.0 strikes me as potentially useful to people looking for more traditionally recognized/acclaimed authors, e.g., since both authors are psychiatrists), but if I had to pick just one I'd recommend How To ADHD.

[phoenixsong]

Was also going to suggest this. Um, mostly based on loving her YT channel. I own the book, but haven’t read it yet. (Inattentive type!)

[cyanmnemosyne]

Hahah very fair! I picked up a copy of her book after really enjoying a few of her videos, sat on it for several months (while knowing I was much more likely to read a book than keep up with YouTube anything), and then in a whirlwind randomly decided one day to start reading it and ADHD 2.0 simultaneously. XD

I found it very engaging once I got started, but of course the "once I got started" is always the hard part ...

[helen_keeble]

Seconding How to ADHD, which is particularly useful to a broad audience as each chapter includes separate targeted sections for both readers with ADHD, and those who are partners/relatives of people with ADHD. So it’s also very useful for non-ADHDers who are looking for advice on supporting loved ones.

[luzula]

I recommend Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences by Rebecca Jordan-Young (2010). My review is here.

[vass]

Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking, edited by Julia Bascom.
Doesn't meet criteria 1 (I forget how old it is, but more than a decade) and reprints some older (some much older) essays by early autistic self-advocates. The reason I'm recommending it anyway is that it's not nearly as well-known as it should be in this genre, and covers ground that more recent autism books frequently overlook. The editor's a woman and so are many of the contributors.

[kiphiana]

I'll recommend "The Dawn of Language" by Sverker Johansson for a bit of both 2 and 3. It's from 2019 so nearly within your time range.

I found it a very good overview of lots of ideas around the origin and function of language, and engagingly written.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58874484-the-dawn-of-language

[rydra_wong]

I passed this call to a bookseller friend who may well have recs - she's going to ponder. In the meantime, she said:

not directly relevant but two books I've found very helpful in a general medical context are:

Unheard: the Medical Practice of Silencing by Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan (excellent on the effect on racialisation in healthcare, particularly - full disclosure, she is also a friend of [a friend])

Divided: racism, medicine and why we need to decolonise healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo

[queenbookwench]

I'm going to Nth both Jessica McCabe's How to ADHD and KC Davis's How to Keep House While Drowning, and also suggest A Radical Guide for Women With ADHD by Sari Solden and Michele Frank; Solden has also written a couple of books on her own with good info (she was the first one to really blow my mind about the conflict that can arise between ADHD and cultural role expectations for women) but unfortunately the covers are really dated and off-putting IMO. Radical Guide is new-ish and has a much better, if still fairly bland for the topic, cover.