Subtitle: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
This book recapitulates Brene Brown’s previous books The Gifts of Imperfection and I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) and adds material on vulnerability and worthiness as it applies to community, work, and parenting. This book feels more complete and at the same time less academic than the prior books. Her research supports her points rather than distancing from them.
Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. They don’t have better or easier lives, they don’t have fewer struggles with addiction or depression, and they haven’t survived fewer traumas or bankruptcies or divorces. (emphasis in the original)
The opposite of scarcity is enough, and we are already enough. Wholehearted living includes showing up and being vulnerable. Vulnerability is not weakness. There is no “get out of vulnerability free” card. Vulnerability is not the same as letting it all hang out.
The Viking-or-Victim worldview divides the world into winners and losers, and has very little room for vulnerability. The worldview is useful in life-threatening or traumatic situations, but prevents connection when the emergency is over.
The book touches on cruelty, how not to be cruel, and how to respond to cruelty. Our culture of narcissism is fed by shaming each other and avoiding vulnerability. As more of us become willing to be vulnerable and authentic, the hope is that bullying will diminish. I wish there were a more concrete, powerful answer.
The book encourages us to dare greatly and be vulnerable despite the fear and shame that arises. Vulnerability is the gateway to joy.
Brene Brown’s website offers free posters with some of the book’s ideas.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: An Agile Primer
Recommended by: Sam Livingston-Gray
While there was a lot of useful information in this book, I kept tripping over basic information presented in what struck me as condescending ways. It is possible to write for novices without assuming they are stupid.
I liked the extended example of planning a bicycle tour, complete with realistic details. It’s easier to read examples where I’m familiar with the domain and get the in-jokes.
I appreciated the emphasis on evaluating costs. If it costs a lot of time and money up front to design carefully, and those costs are never recouped, then the effort spent on design was not cost-effective.
Plan for future changes, but don’t try to anticipate them. Postpone decisions until you have more information, but isolate your assumptions to just one place in the code so you’ll be able to change them later.
The refactoring advice in this book seems targeted at small to medium-sized systems. She suggests that an inheritance hierarchy should be either deep or wide but not both, but does not offer alternatives for managing a system that doesn’t fit within those constraints.
When using inheritance, use hooks called from the parent class so that the child class does not have to call super in just the right way.
She advocates for composition over inheritance, using Forwardable to let an object respond to a contained object’s methods.
The patterns for reusing tests to match reused code look very useful. When you include a module in a class, include a test for that module in the test for the class. Test only the public interface of a class – its private methods are its own business. Test the state changes caused by incoming messages. Test outgoing commands with mocks of their recipients.
Recommended if you’re new to object-oriented design, or if you want to learn about some Ruby-specific design patterns, or if your coworkers quote heavily from this book.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Sam Livingston-Gray
This book conveys tips, tricks, and cautions in a conversational style without talking down to the reader. Several topics became immediately useful when I recognized them in the code at work the next day.
Some of Ruby’s oddities, I mean special features, are:
- No static type-checking. Pass any object as an argument to a method, and if it answers to the methods called on it, all is well. This is formally known as “duck typing,” as in “if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…”
- Pass anonymous blocks to functions. For example Array.each will call a block on each element of an array.
- Add/change/delete methods in classes at runtime.
- Mix in new functionality by including modules in a class.
- Override method_missing to extend a class on the fly. This is considered a “standard” trick.
Highly recommended if you’re programming in Ruby. I’d read Russ Olsen’s writing on any topic based on the quality of this book.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Sam Livingston-Gray
This book is written in a more formal, technical style than Test-Driven Design by Example. I’m glad I read the latter book first.
The main new idea I learned from this book is to set up a testable skeleton of a new application at the beginning. This involves researching infrastructure decisions up front, as well as dealing with the thorny issue of installation. The authors’ point is that this work has to be done at some point, and it makes project schedules a lot more reliable in the long run when it is done first.
The authors advocate for making software objects small and shifting emphasis to the communication between them.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: Use Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and More to Advance Your Career
Recommended by: Nancy Hyde
A practical guide to networking online. Details about how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as more general networking tips on “building one’s brand.”
I read this a little at a time over a few months. The first few chapters were too basic for me, since I’ve had an online presence for 20 years. Then I got stuck on the exercises to develop one’s message and tagline, since it didn’t feel like the right time to do that work in relation to finding a software job. I skimmed through the rest, which has specific details on different online networks.
Useful tips: there are networks based in Europe, like xing.com. Groups on LinkedIn help raise one’s visibility. Facebook is being used more for business networking.
This book has good, basic advice for networking and job hunting. The examples are a little too cheerily positive for my taste, but of course they’re going to use successful examples. Recommended if you want to learn more about this topic.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person
Judith Blackstone helps people get more present in their bodies to realize their spiritual goals. She specifically helps spiritually sensitive people. I hadn’t encountered that phrase before, but it fits with my ideas about sensitivity in general: permeability and attentiveness to the environment and surrounding people.
Her emphasis on lived experience rather than imagined visualizations resonates for me. Her process matches my intuition about going “down and in” rather than “up and out” to meet my spiritual self. She writes that the answer to permeability is to inhabit ourselves more fully, not attempt to wall ourselves off. “When we experience life from within the body rather than from its surface, we find that we can relax our protective vigilance to the world around us.”
She describes a set of exercises called the Realization Process and gives several examples of assisting people to do them.
The exercises start with getting present in one’s feet. Not just aware, but present. When I do that, it feels wonderfully like being a gorilla, walking around on my hands. I can get present in my legs while biking, and feel them alternately rising and pushing down.
Recommended for anyone who feels they don’t quite belong here and would like to feel more connected to their body and their life.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Sam Livingston-Gray
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a tool to manage the complexity and difficulty of writing software. It offers an alternative to the “waterfall” approach: design specification, functional specification, implementation, testing, release. In theory each step is finished before going on to the next. The problem is that there is a whole lot of debugging during and after implementation, testing, and release.
In TDD, the programmer writes a test for one small aspect of a program, then implements the minimum code required to satisfy that test. Once the new test passes, the code is refactored to remove duplication while still passing all tests. Repeat as needed. In this way, designs evolve to satisfy existing conditions rather than guessing about what’s needed months or years in advance. In addition, the code is always in a working state.
This is the most conversational software book I’ve read. It’s like having the author next to you at a computer, explaining the steps as you type. After years of battling waterfall development cycles, I’m convinced TDD is a useful approach, and I’m eager to try it.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Authors: Melissa Malde, MaryJean Allen, Kurt-Alexander Zeller
I read this as a followup to What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body, since I’m a singer, not a musician. I expected it to be similarly playful and filled with illustrations more than words. I also expected it to cover very similar material.
I was wrong on both counts. In careful detail, this book covers the anatomy and mechanics of breathing, phonation (making sound with the vocal cords), articulation (forming words with the mouth and tongue), and stage presence. Even the general material on the body is covered in more detail than in the Musician book.
Did you know that your tongue is rooted far below your teeth, extends to the back of your throat, and is much larger than that part you can see? It’s made up of many muscle fibers that can act independently of each other.
Did you know that if a letter sounds different in another language, it is made with different movements of the tongue and mouth? It makes sense, but I had never thought about it. The American English ‘T’ sound is made with the tongue touching the upper teeth. In Spanish (and other Romance languages), ‘T’ is made with the tongue touching farther back on the hard palate. I speak both languages, and had never been aware of that.
Did you know that your ribs are attached in back at your spine, and in front at your sternum, and move up and out as you breathe in, like bucket handles? I had heard that many times, but hadn’t felt the movement clearly.
Did you know that your ankle is in front of your heel, not right over it? Your heel forms part of a triangle that supports your weight, and your leg bones come down inside the triangle, not on the back point. Check your own foot and see. I’ve worked on a lot of feet, and never consciously noticed that.
This book is amazing. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand their body better from the inside and improve their singing along the way.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: Modelo de Trauma y Recuperación para Mujeres Latinas
Translation: Knowledge is Power: Model of Trauma and Recovery for Latina Women
Recommended by: Fabiana Wallis’ bio at Conexiones
This book is a curriculum for a 25-session trauma recovery support group for Latina women. Since I hope to work with Conexiones Center for Trauma Recovery as a practitioner, my goal was to refresh my Spanish language skills and learn the vocabulary associated with trauma and recovery. It served that goal well.
The book also included specific information about Latino/a culture and issues for immigrants.
I read this book as both a practitioner helping people recover from trauma, and as a daughter of immigrants from Latin America who experienced trauma. I fit the target reader in some ways and not in others, especially since the book assumes a sharp separation between facilitators and group members.
The information was very basic, aimed at group participants who had never thought about trauma and its connection to present behaviors. There was recurring emphasis on the issues of drug use, prostitution, and unprotected sex. There was no discussion of the mechanisms of PTSD in the body.
In the various units, I saw identification of the damage wrought by trauma, but less help in building new skills than I expected. I imagine a woman reaching the end of the support group and thinking, “Now what?!” At the same time, I imagine that the opportunity to speak about past trauma and receive support would be healing in itself.
When used by knowledgeable and compassionate group facilitators, I think this book would form the basis for a useful, culturally aware support group for Latina survivors of abuse.
Available at Conexiones Center for Trauma Recovery.
Subtitle: Sexual Abuse, The Child’s Voice
Recommended by: Madge Bray
Madge Bray shares her journey as a child advocate social worker, along with several abused children’s case histories. Woven through the book is the history of recognition and backlash around the sexual abuse of children. Madge Bray pioneered the use of toys and play therapy to elicit children’s stories and help them heal.
The toys include anatomically correct dolls, angry puppets, and a battery-operated rabbit that trembles silently. Madge Bray offers a neutral, welcoming space for the children to interact with the toys and find self-expression. She enters into their world rather than demanding that they communicate in adult ways.
The book is intense and riveting. It tells of catastrophic abuse from the wounded child’s perspective, as the child is heard and helped. It tells of victorious court battles as well as one story about a child whose parents withdrew him from therapy before he could tell his story.
Recommended as a look into social work with children in England, the realities of child sexual abuse, and the healing power of deep listening.
Available at Amazon.com.
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