Marian’s Book List

 

Introduction

 

This list is a resource for:

 

• Therapists, counselors and personal coaches.
• Those seeking personal growth.
• Students of human nature.
• Seekers of inspiration.
• Those interested in human potential.
• Those interested in animal intelligence and in inter-species communication.

 

Friends and colleagues have been asking me to put this list together for years.  Here it is as a start.  It will grow as I post more old favorites and discover new ones.  Each book listed here has something outstanding about it, so all are recommended unless otherwise noted.  The point here is not to review as many books as I can, but to share the best that I have found.  Most of them are the outstanding in the sense of outstandingly good or useful and a few may be noted as outstandingly bad, in my opinion.

 

To make the list as browser-friendly as possible, I have set up a few categories.  Since some books will fit more than one category, they’ll be listed in the primary category in which they belong, in my opinion, and also have symbols all of categories they fit into, to make them easier to find. 

 

Thanks to Amazon.com Books for being the most incredible resource ever for both readers and writers.  Compiling this list would have been much more difficult without Amazon.  Click on the Amazon icon to the right of any book to go directly there to purchase it if you wish.

 

Thanks for visiting my list.  I hope that you will find it useful.

 

Categories and Symbols

 

***    Most Highly Recommended

            These are the life-changers, the paradigm-shifters.  These are the “what if you were marooned on a desert island with only a few books?” choices.

 

*      Highly Recommended

            These are books I have recommended to clients and colleagues over and over for years.

 

▪     Useful for Therapists, Counselors and Personal Coaches

            These are useful either from the point of the knowledge itself, or for recommending to clients for “Bibliotherapy”.  (A note about Bibliotherapy:  For those of us working within the person-centered context, I find suggesting books to clients to fit just fine.  As long as our approach is, “What did you think of that book?” without any fixed agenda of what the client is supposed to get from it, we remain person-centered.  When I recommend a book to a client I say up front, “If you think that it’s a bunch of hog-wash, then that’s that.  We will only spend time discussing it if you find in interesting and useful.”)

 

 □      Personal Growth and Self-Help

          These tend to fall into two categories: books useful just from the point of view of knowledge, and those that give practical suggestions or exercises to use toward some specific objective.

 

◊        Relationships/Marriage/Family/Children & Child Development

            Fairly self-explanatory.  I thought of breaking up this category into several, but they all tend to affect each other.  The titles and the reviews make it clear what each book covers.

 

∞       Inspiration/Human Evolution and Potential/the Future

          This encompasses both the general feel-good kind of inspirational works and also some that talk about, “How do we get there?”  If you have looked at my little essay “Human Potential”, you know that I am of the opinion that humankind is capable of very high states of functioning, both in terms of normal daily life and of attaining (and ultimately maintaining) peak spiritual states. 

 

¤      Animal Intelligence & Inter-Species Communication

            A special interest of mine. 

 

°     Health, Healing & Medical Matters

 

 §    Miscellaneous

          Humor (so therapeutic), fiction (often healing or inspiring) and film.