Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

nonfiction

“May We Forever Stand” by Imani Perry

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Subtitle: A History of the Black National Anthem

Recommended to me by: Jesse the K

The author Dr. Imani Perry was at the time of publication in 2018 the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Wikipedia says that in addition to a Ph.D., she has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. As of 2023, she is now a professor at Harvard.Her book is a carefully researched and engagingly written in-depth historical study of the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as it has been intertwined with Black Americans’ creation of a rich community life and struggles for civil rights.

The song was written by brothers James Weldon Johnson (lyrics) and John Rosamond Johnson (music) in 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida. The song spread among the many Black formal and informal community associations and was soon named the Black National Anthem.

It was sung at all-Black schools as part of nurturing the pride and sense of self of the students. It was woven into plays created to educate children and adults alike about the struggles and achievements of Black Americans. It created solidarity and hope.

The book contains enough content for a semester course on Black American History from the end of the Civil War through to the 1980s, with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” tying it all together.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

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Subtitle: Freeing the Writer Within

Recommended to me by: finding it in a little free library

Natalie Goldberg combines writing practice and Zen practice in short chapters where she shares about her own writing adventures, and repeatedly admonishes the reader (or herself) to just sit down and write. I appreciated her ongoing willingness to sink into the depths of herself and write whatever showed up. The book veers between writing exercises, Zen wisdom, and her anxiety about eating too many brownies.

“A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken to the specialness of simply being.”

“If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.”

“We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.”

I wonder if this book would have landed differently for me if I had read it when I was still writing and sending out an article each month. Since writing is not something I’m trying to make a living at, I don’t have the urgency or intensity around it that this book speaks to.

Recommended for people wrestling with being a writer as an identity, a practice, and/or a career.

Available at bookshop.org.

“brown girl dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson

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Recommended to me by: Reading Jaqueline Woodson’s children’s book The Day You Begin

In spare, elegant poetry with each word exactly as it needs to be, Jacqueline Woodson takes us back before her birth in her family history, and then slowly forward in time. She shares her sensory experiences as a young child in Ohio and then in the South, and later after her family moved to Brooklyn, NY. The writing is lyrical, gripping, joyous, painful.

Life is dangerous for a Black family in the 60s and 70s, and she grieves for relatives as they die, at the same time as she struggles with reading in school and bonds with a neighbor girl as Forever Friends. She is aware of the struggle for civil rights, and participates as much as she can.

Highly recommended! Every word is worth reading, through the acknowledgements and end notes all the way to the photographs of family members as children at the very end.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Just Being at the Piano” by Mildred Portney Chase

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Subtitle: Harmony Begins in the Soul, Long Before the First Note Is Played

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

A meditative little book on how to learn and teach piano in a kind, body-centered way. Mildred Portney Chase was a musical prodigy, playing piano by ear at age 3 or 4, and went on to be a concert pianist. She writes in detail about how she finds relaxed, sensitive movement in her fingers, hands, and arms to play her best. She fiercely defends the right of young students to improvise and learn at their own pace.

I have only studied a little piano. Some of the book is applicable to singing, and some of it is specific to the piano, which as she says is an instrument that cannot be brought close in to the musician’s body. I passed the book along to a piano player and teacher, and I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of it.

Recommended if you’re interested in music and musicians, or if you play piano and want to create beautiful tones.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” by Jenny Davidow

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Subtitle: Open the Floodgates to Your Creativity

Recommended to me by: the author

Your Mindful Journal and Memoir by Jenny Davidow has great advice for making journal entries more lively and personal and present. My paper journal is completely private and I’m not trying to improve it in any way, but the tips feel useful for online posts, and could apply to creative writing, too.

I met Jenny at Balkan camp years ago and we corresponded a bit about her book. I was happy to review it on Amazon:

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” is good medicine for our frenetic, fragmented modern lives. Jenny Davidow distills decades of experience with mindfulness, journaling, creativity, and teaching into a step-by-step guide full of wisdom and kindness.

For someone new to journaling, the book offers ideas on what to write and how to center it on the present moment even when it is about the past. For someone whose Inner Critic says, “You can’t say that!” or “You’re doing it wrong,” the book offers a shift toward safe experiments and listening inwardly with a kind ear. For someone whose attention is focused on external approval, the book offers fiercely guarded privacy and tuning in to one’s own voice and preferences.

For everyone, the book offers innovative ways to combine journaling with mindfulness and self-exploration, creating a lively personal record. For those who want to share individual entries or publish a memoir, the book offers strategies to do so with creativity and care.

As a longtime journal-writer, I appreciated the gentle invitations to turn events into metaphors, and I enjoyed reading the author’s example entries shared from her own journals.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a journal but struggles with what to say, or who wants to heal their connection with their creativity, or who wants to create a memoir but doesn’t know where to start.

Available at Amazon.

“Effective Testing with RSpec 3” by Myron Marston and Erin Dees

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Subtitle: Build Ruby Apps with Confidence

Recommended to me by: a coworker who started a book group about it

RSpec is an automated testing framework for Ruby and Rails programs. It covers both unit tests (fast, narrowly scoped) and feature tests (slower, broadly scoped).

A small group of coworkers met every two weeks via video chat and discussed one chapter at a time. We reviewed the chapter topics and discussed how they apply to the large application we work on. I did most of the exercises and outside reading because I learn better that way.

The book starts with an extended, detailed example that covers most of the topics in the book, and then those topics are covered again chapter by chapter. It reads as if the example was originally at the end, and then they decided to move it to the beginning and then duplicate a lot of material to make it understandable.

That caveat aside, the book is clear, understandable, and very useful when working with RSpec. It covers details of configuration, command line arguments like –only-failures (only run the tests that failed on the previous run), and suggestions for how to structure tests to be reliable, readable, and maintainable.

Recommended for anyone who writes or maintains RSpec tests or who would like to start using RSpec for Rails or Ruby code.

Available at bookshop.org.