James R. Doty

Grew up in Lancaster, California with an alcoholic father and a mother on disability, and walked into a magic shop at twelve where the owner's mother taught him relaxation, visualisation and, as he tells it, how to stop hating himself.

Into the Magic Shop pairs that with his later career as a neurosurgeon and the operation he got wrong, and with making and losing a fortune in medical devices.

Doty founded the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research at Stanford and gave most of his remaining equity away. The neuroscience is light; the memoir is the substance.