"Memorable" means many different things to different people. Some books have haunted me, such as As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto: an incredible story of medical hubris. Or The Death of Innocents by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, even more of same. And never mind scientific hubris, how about hubris on a much larger scale: A Problem from Hell by Samantha Powers; read and weep.

If "memorable" means "the most interesting" then I would have to include the amazing story of Kaspar Hauser. If you can't find the English translation of Feuerbach's book Kaspar Hauser — an account of an individual kept in a dungeon, separated from all communication with the world, from early childhood to about the age of seventeen, published in Boston in 1833 — you can read my The Wild Child: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser.

Other books are memorable to me because they changed the way I saw things. Although trained as a psychoanalyst, I knew nothing about the truth of psychiatry until I read Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears by Janet Gotkin. No contest: the single best book against psychiatry ever written. Similarly, I could not think about German science in the same way once I read Murderous Science by Benno Müller-Hill. If you want to know what prominent German psychiatrists did to "mental patients" during the Second World War, read this searing indictment of German science under the Third Reich. As for life-changing, well, what changes your life more than to realize you have been eating your friends? Diet for a New America by John Robbins changed the way I ate and the way I thought about food forever.

For sheer interest, it is hard to beat The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, still, in my opinion, the best book written about dogs (better, for example, than the popular Dogs Never Lie about Love). Some books are just deep, like Coetzee's. His chapters about animals in the novel Elizabeth Costello... nobody has written about the everyday slaughter of animals and the Holocaust with such deep conviction (and yes, he is a vegetarian — he told me). And speaking of animals, who would ever have thought that possibly the best book written about animals in the last ten years comes from the pen of George Bush's senior speech-writer: Mathew Scully's Dominion?

I have two strange comments: "memorable" to me also means "maddening," as in wild, insane — and I don't often use that word. My list of hated books could go on forever, but I cannot omit the awful Yellow Dog by Martin Amis; the favorite novel of New Zealanders, the only one to win the booker prize, The Bone People by Keri Hulme; and all new books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow (I will read anything they write, but loathe the books nonetheless). You have to know the enemy.

My strangest comment I save for the end: the single best book I have not read has not yet been written. It is by Ross Cheit, a professor of political science at Brown, and it will come out eventually. It is about repressed memory and child sexual abuse. The man is a phenomenon! Watch for it.
About Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Masson has written more than a dozen books, including When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (with Susan McCarthy), Dogs Never Lie about Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, and, most recently, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. A former Sanskrit scholar and Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, child, two cats, and three dogs.

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