If you liked
Books like The Body Keeps the Score
by Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score is the canonical contemporary popular-medicine book on trauma. Bessel van der Kolk's three-decade synthesis of how chronic psychological trauma is stored in the body has become the most-cited contemporary work on the subject. If you finished it and needed more reading in the same register, these are our picks.
The shortlist
What to read next
Atlas of the Heartby Brene Brown
“Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown 2021 review. An illustrated mapping of eighty-seven distinct human emotions organized into thirteen emotional landscapes. Brown's most ambitious popular-psychology book.”
The Anxious Generationby Jonathan Haidt
“The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt 2024 review. The smartphone-and-social-media-driven youth mental-health crisis and a four-point reform proposal. The most-cited contemporary book on adolescent psychology.”
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankindby Yuval Noah Harari
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari 2014 review. A single-volume history of Homo sapiens from cognitive revolution to the present. The popular-history bestseller that defined the 2010s book-club shelf, with the trade-offs that ambition requires.”
Outliveby Peter Attia
“Outlive by Peter Attia 2023 review. A medical strategy for extending healthspan by directly addressing cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and Type 2 diabetes. The bestselling popular medicine book of 2023.”
Educatedby Tara Westover
“Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.”
Crying in H Martby Michelle Zauner
“Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 2021 review. Michelle Zauner's memoir about her Korean mother's death from pancreatic cancer and the Korean food that connected them. The breakout literary commercial memoir of 2021.”
FAQ
Common questions about The Body Keeps the Score read-alikes
- What is the closest non-fiction match?
- Atlas of the Heart (Brene Brown's emotion-mapping work). The two books work in conversation: van der Kolk on the neurobiology of trauma response, Brown on the vocabulary for naming what is happening in the moment. Read together they are stronger than either alone.
- I want more on trauma specifically.
- Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal and When the Body Says No, Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger, and Pat Ogden's Trauma and the Body are the canonical adjacent picks. None are reviewed here yet but all are standard reading in any trauma-clinician training program.
- I want a memoir that handles trauma directly.
- Educated (Tara Westover on family-of-origin trauma) and Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner on grief and the inheritance of an alcoholic-mother household) are the closest matches in our catalog. Both refuse the redemptive memoir arc.
- I want a science book that does adjacent work.
- The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt on youth mental-health), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari on the species-scale argument), and Outlive (Peter Attia on extending healthspan) are doing related popular-medicine work in different registers.
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