nonfiction

“Surviving Domestic Violence” by Elaine Weiss

September 8, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Voices of Women Who Broke Free
Recommended to me by: Finding it in a Little Free Library

A compassionate and thorough look at how women get ensnared into abusive relationships with men, and how they get themselves out. Elaine Weiss includes her own story. She clarifies repeatedly that the abuse is not the victim/survivor’s fault, and there is no “type” of woman that is more vulnerable. Any woman can get into a relationship with an abusive person, and that’s what creates an abusive relationship.

The book was published in 2000, which only partially excuses its heterosexual and gendered lens. Yes, many abusive relationships are men abusing women. And some are not. This book could have also addressed queer relationships and women abusers in at least one of its examples.

The stories are also strongly biased toward the women finding loving marriages after leaving the abusive relationships. This supports the point that it’s not the women’s fault, but also pushes the narrative that a positive relationship is the ultimate goal and measure of success in healing.

It took me a long time to start reading the book after picking it up. And I did skim a couple of the stories where I didn’t want to read about the verbal abuse the woman was enduring. The bewildered teen looking around to see if anyone will tell her the abuse is wrong and not her fault breaks my heart. But I’m glad I did finally read the book. It is a great resource for people who carry stereotypes about who gets abused and why, both as bystanders and as people who have been abused themselves.

Available via Biblio.com.

“If the Buddha Married” by Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D.

April 6, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path
Recommended to me by: Seeing it in a Little Free Library and liking If the Buddha Dated

I chose Love as my word for this year, so this book feels appropriate to pick up. I tried reading “How to Love” by Thich Nhat Hanh earlier, and got bogged down in the prescriptiveness and assumptions about gender roles, so I put it down halfway through. This book doesn’t have those problems, although all the couples appear to be heterosexual until one at the very end of the book.

Charlotte Karl writes with clarity, depth, and kindness. When I was getting toward the end of the book, I thought, “Surely that’s the end of the substantive material,” but there were several more important topics, all treated with the same thoughtfulness as the rest of the book – sexuality, monogamy, honesty, and affairs.

Other topics include working through tension and resistance, recognizing masks, keeping agreements with great care, living in an “us” place (rather than me vs. you), open communication, and offering appreciation. It also includes some of the things that get in the way of authentic relationships, such as reacting out of unprocessed trauma from a young self, projecting feelings onto the other person, taking the partner for granted, and trying to change them into someone else.

The book is grounded in Zen Buddhism, and tries to be inclusive of other religions, such as the Quakers. There is a clunker of a moment where Charlotte Karl refers to the Jewish philosophy of repentance and repair in connection with Rosh Hashanah (new year) instead of Yom Kippur (day of atonement). Where was her editor?! She summarizes in a few paragraphs what Danya Ruttenberg explores in depth in her book “On Repentance and Repair.” (I read half of that recently, but it was more academic than I wanted, and focused at the national rather than the personal level.)

It’s good to read stories of couples who are kind, committed, and most of all, successful at building happy lives together while being their authentic selves. I have wanted a relationship like that for a long time. I had more or less decided that what I want is a mirage. Now I’m reminded that maybe it is possible, although I still don’t know a path to bring it into my life.

Highly recommended if you also care about the how and why of authentic relationships.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Somebody I Used to Know” by Wendy Mitchell

March 3, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Memoir
Recommended to me by: a friend

Wendy Mitchell is a vibrant, strong, smart woman, proud of her memory, her home renovations, and her two now-adult daughters whom she raised on her own. At age 57, she starts to feel fatigued and confused, and falls unexpectedly several times while running.

She has what appears to be a small stroke, and is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s soon afterward at age 58. She is determined to remain independent as long as possible and uses multiple alarms on her iPad throughout her day to remind her to do tasks like make food, and then eat the food she made.

After being forced to retire from her beloved NHS job for ill health, she becomes an activist for people with dementia, participating in research and giving talks on her experience. She has to write out her talks in advance, map out her travels by public transit, and print photos of where she’ll be staying.

The book is absorbing on the level of getting to know Wendy and her story, as well as on the level of learning more about the effects of Alzheimer’s and how to live well after being diagnosed.

Highly recommended.

She wrote two books after this one and kept a blog, Which Me Am I Today.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Serviceberry” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

January 18, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Recommended to me by: Reading Kimmerer’s other books

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous scientist, writer, and teacher. She shares the gathered wisdom of her Potawatomi tribe, along with her knowledge of the ins and outs of academia as a botanist.

She compares the Indigenous gift economy, which is in harmony with the natural world, to capitalist economics that try to extract maximum value, wrecking the natural world. The book is small and brief, 100 pages, illustrated with pen and ink drawings.

The serviceberry bush has many names because it is important to many communities and cultures. The berries are eaten fresh, and dried to make pemmican for travel and winter months. Birds also feast on the berries. Their abundant berries lead to gratitude, which leads to reciprocity and paying it forward, which feeds the cycle of life. A specific instance of picking serviceberries described in vivid detail provides a rich scaffold for considering how we can learn from plants and live better.

How can we grow gift economies within and alongside the capitalist system? There are already little free libraries, tool libraries, neighborhood food banks, trash nothing and buy nothing online groups, and neighborhood organizations for mutual aid.

This book is a joyful celebration of all of those, along with a careful, encouraging exploration of a positive direction to replace the negative of capitalism. The more we can each support our local gift economies, the more joy and sustainability we bring into our lives.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Resilient Management” by Lara Hogan

November 30, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Allison McMillan

Managers of engineering teams are often software engineers promoted to management without additional training, and without the realization that management is a new job requiring new skills. This is a compassionate and kind book with a lot of practical, actionable advice on how to be better manager of a software team.

It starts with a common description of the stages of a new Agile team:

Forming – everyone is politely getting to know each other
Storming – conflicts arise from people’s different ways of working and interacting
Norming – the team settles into functional ways of working together
Performing – the team is a cohesive whole, effectively moving forward and accomplishing their goals

In the section on getting to know team members, Lara Hogan emphasizes that everyone has different needs and preferences, and it works better to be curious than to assume everyone is the same. She offers this list of First 1:1 Questions to get to know each person.

It is important to be mindful of people’s core needs. Paloma Medina describes core needs as:

Belonging
Improvement/Progress
Choice
Equality/Fairness
Predictability
Significance

which spells BICEPS as a memory aid. More at: palomamedina.com/biceps

Managers have many jobs, from keeping the team’s work on track to coaching team members to helping resolve problems and conflicts. Managers can ask themselves what they are optimizing for, and communicate that, to help team members know what to expect and how best to work together.

With each team member, managers can mentor (give advice), coach (ask open questions), sponsor (give a team member opportunities) and give feedback (both positive and negative). Coaching is a skill worth developing to help people grow.

One way to structure feedback is: Observation of behavior + Impact of behavior + Request or Question = Specific, actionable feedback. Observations should be neutral and factual. Impact can relate to feelings, and should also be measurable and understandable by the feedback recipient. For example, emails that are too terse add much more time to the overall process of communicating.

Set clear expectations and assign roles for projects and decisions with RACI – who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This prevents committees where everyone is in on the discussions but no one person takes action.

Teams can have a Vision, Mission, Strategy, and Objectives to align toward accomplishing their goals.

Identify and document the team’s meetings, communication channels, and processes, to help new people who are joining, and to have a single point of reference.

Plan carefully for communications about difficult topics that impact the team, for example, reorgs or layoffs. Who needs to know when, what to say, etc.

Communication can have different tones or energies, which can be represented with colors.

Red – a bit of anger, frustration, edge, or urgency
Orange – cautious, hesitant, tiptoes around topics
Yellow – lighthearted, effervescent, cracks jokes
Green – in tune with others’ feelings, loving, high emotional intelligence
Blue – calm, cool, collected, steady
Purple – creative, flow, great at storytelling
Brown – adds (and lives in) nuance, complexity, or ambiguity
Black – blunt, unfeeling, no nuance, cut and dry

Listen for people’s motivations and connect messages about things you want them to do to things they care about.

Manage your own energy, and delegate more to team members, which helps them grow and lightens your load. Say no to things that aren’t the highest priorities. Develop a support network of other managers, by reaching out for conversations.

Highly recommended for new and existing managers, and also people who are managed. We can acquire new skills on both sides of the management relationship.

Available at bookshop.org.

“What Every Pianist Needs to Know about the Body” by Thomas Mark

November 16, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Reading What Every Singer Needs to Know about the Body

I bought this book around the time I studied piano for a year in 2015, but never got around to reading it. I got rid of it along with two bike trailer loads of books at Powells before leaving Portland. Now in 2024 I’m learning piano again with renewed interest, so I got the book from inter-library loan and gave it a try.

What Every Singer Needs to Know about the Body is very dense and technical. I read it a few pages at a time. I expected the piano book to be similarly dense. Instead, it is more accessibly written and covers some of the same material as What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body, so I could read it a chapter or two at time.

It was useful to see the general material about balance and alignment in the body again. I’m starting to sense my AO joint that supports the base of my skull, and understand what it might mean to free my neck instead of pulling my head down. I’m still trying to sense the weight-supporting part of my lumbar spine curving up through the center of my body.

This book talks a lot about freeing the arms and integrating their movement with the whole body, since the arms (not just the fingers) play the piano. Most of what we think of as back and chest muscles are really arm muscles, originating on the torso and attaching to the shoulder blade and humerus.

I appreciated the exercise to find balance for the collarbone and shoulder blade position. Pull them up, then slowly allow them to release down until there’s no muscular effort. Pull them down and then slowly release up. Pull them forward and slowly release back. Pull them back and slowly release forward. I want to do that at the beginning of practice sessions. (Described at about 1:15:00 in the video linked below.)

You can think of the forearm and hand having a shallow arch, with the keystone at the wrist. Lead with the head and reach with your whole spine when leaning toward the top or bottom notes of the keyboard.

It also had revelatory material about the piano itself. To play louder, press the keys faster to “throw” the little hammer at the string more strongly. To play softer, press the keys more slowly. I was having trouble figuring out loud and soft, and this explains it. Also, once a key’s descent triggers that hammer throw, continuing to push hard on it will have no effect on the sound. Releasing the key does release the damper to end the sound.

Of all the books I got rid of, this is one I will buy again, because it’s useful to me now, and I’m going to want to come back to the material.

It has material for organists too, which was interesting even though less directly useful to me. I had no idea playing the organ was such an athletic whole-body activity.

Highly recommended for pianists and organists!

I also got rid of the companion video, and I found it again on the Internet Archive! What Every Pianist Needs to Know about the Body (2 hour video) by Thomas Mark. Also highly recommended. It’s illuminating to see his demonstrations of moving in balance, and some of the ways to be out of balance.

Available at bookshop.org.