Book Reviews

Julia Cameron published The Artist’s Way in 1992 with a premise that felt counterintuitive to many readers then and still does now: most people who consider themselves non-creative are not lacking talent but recovering from creative injury. Subtitled “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” the book is structured as a twelve-week program designed to help…

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy arrived in 1980 as a quiet challenge to the way psychiatry thought about depression. David D. Burns, a psychiatrist at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania and a student of Aaron T. Beck (the psychologist who developed cognitive therapy), wrote a book built around a claim that sounded almost…

Gay Hendricks spent more than four decades working as a psychologist and executive coach before writing The Big Leap. In that time he worked with Olympic athletes, corporate executives, and couples on the edge of divorce, and he kept noticing the same pattern: people who had every resource available to them seemed to hit an…

Brené Brown has built a career out of making people uncomfortable in the best possible way. Her TED talk on vulnerability has been watched well over forty million times, her books have sold in the tens of millions, and somewhere along the way she became one of the most recognizable voices in American psychology. With…

Greg McKeown published Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less in 2014, and in the decade since, it has sold more than two million copies in over forty languages. That scale of readership doesn’t happen by accident. McKeown, a British-born author and consultant who trained at Stanford, identified something specific about the contemporary professional condition: most…

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking begins with a sentence that reorders everything that comes after it: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” On the night of December 30, 2003, that sentence became literal. Didion and her husband of forty…

Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better) arrived in November 2020 from BenBella Books, and its timing was not incidental. The world was deep in a pandemic. Racial justice protests had reshaped national conversation about who gets to live safely and freely. The question of…

Lindsay C. Gibson’s 2015 book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents opened a door for millions of readers who had spent years struggling to name something they knew was wrong but lacked the language to describe. It gave clinical precision to a pattern of parental behavior that causes lasting harm without ever crossing the threshold…