activism

“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.

“May We Forever Stand” by Imani Perry

July 15, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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.

“Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors” edited by Grist

March 30, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Grist is a non-profit news organization that reports on climate change with a focus on equity. They run an annual short-story contest called Imagine 2200 and publish the winning and runner-up stories. This is the 2021 collection. The stories are available on Grist’s website

Many of the stories create a plausible future world that includes disaster and moves beyond it to show thriving and surviving communities. The stories are written by diverse authors and include characters from a variety of cultures, with a variety of skin colors, sexual orientations, genders, and abilities or disabilities. These futures include us all.

I had read Marissa Lingen’s story A Worm to the Wise before, and was happy to see it again. The other stories and authors were new to me, and I liked almost all of them. One of them made me cry, in a good way.

The stories all include some kind of hope, and they all include grief for what is lost. This is not “lalala we can ignore climate change,” but “let’s talk about how we can learn new skills and change our priorities so we can survive and thrive.” Recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better” by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao

July 2, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: With a Guide to Start the Unlearning
Recommended to me by: Third Eye Books giveaway

On International Women’s Day in March 2023, I heard that Third Eye Books was giving away an anti-racist book for white women. I clicked on the link to receive one. After a few weeks, I realized it never arrived and looked back at their website. They had received 50,000 orders! I thought they would only send books to the first few (hundred) people who ordered, but just in time for Juneteenth 2023, the book arrived.

From the introduction:

“Race2Dinner was founded in 2019 as a dinner experience with Regina Jackson, a Black woman; Saira Rao, an Asian woman; and eight-to-ten white women. […] These dinners require white women to participate in direct, difficult conversations. It is not for the faint of heart.”

The preface speaks directly to white women.

“You know what you’re doing. But you pretend not to. […] So yes, we’ll explain to you how you’re racist. Even though we’re pretty sure you already know, whether you’re ready to admit it or not. […]

“White men may be on the throne. But you white women are shining it, fluffing the cushions, catching the coins that fall from their laps. […]

“YES. ALL. WHITE. WOMEN”

I kept reading with my eyebrows raised. A whole book of being yelled at did not sound pleasant or educational, no matter how true or justified the message. After the extended preface, the book shifts to tell the story of several of their dinner parties, and the way the conversations get derailed the same way over and over, all over the country. No wonder they’re yelling.

Saira Rao describes growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants in a white community, aspiring to the perfection that white womanhood requires, but undermined from the start by her brown skin. The need for perfection and the endless backbiting and judgment undermine the white women around her as well. Anti-racism is only possible when mistakes are allowed, because unlearning racism and white supremacy is a difficult, mistake-ridden process.

White fragility, white tears, white allies, white saviors, white violence. They emphasize that silence is violence. Silently witnessing racism makes us an accomplice to it. We need to stand up and name what we see and speak against it, even though we are shamed and punished for breaking step with white supremacy.

Recommended as a refresher if you have already done a lot of anti-racist work. I don’t think this book would be palatable to someone just starting out.

Available at bookshop.org.

“When the Angels Left the Old Country” by sacha lamb

March 12, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph and Becca.

This is a book about an angel and a demon (and some humans). A Jewish angel, a Jewish demon, and Jewish queer humans, emigrating by ship from a tiny shtetl in Poland to New York.

The angel is obviously, essentially Good, and at the same time it can be oblivious, and its actions can have evil effects. The demon is selfish and encourages wickedness, and its actions can have ultimately good effects. They are conflicted within themselves, argue endlessly with each other, and love and need each other deeply. This complexity and debate around questions of good and evil, intent and action, are quintessentially Jewish, in contrast to a single clear polarizing answer.

Of course some immigrants were queer, and of course some of them would fall in love with each other. As a Jewish queer human myself, it was surprising and delightful to feel recognized in the world of this book, permeated with Yiddish phrases and Jewish mysticism.

The prose is a pleasure to read, tumbling from one scene to the next and only occasionally allowing the uncertainty and danger to ratchet too high. The outcome is satisfying neat, even if full repentance is a little unexpected.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit

March 31, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: It’s by Rebecca Solnit!

Rebecca Solnit starts from an encounter with rosebushes planted by George Orwell almost 100 years before, and expands with her usual grace and skill on his life as an essayist, activist, soldier in the Spanish Civil War, gardener, husband, and father. From there, she delves into his research into coal mining and its disastrous effects on the miners and on the environment; Stalin and his atrocities in the name of communism; Colombia’s greenhouses growing roses for export, with disastrous effects on the growers and the environment; and many more discursions on roses, beauty, totalitarianism, and history.

She shows that Orwell balanced the darkness in his writing and worldview with a joy in the natural world. He grew much of his own food, in addition to roses, in rural England.

Sometimes [Orwell] celebrated what was meant by the roses in “bread and roses”: the intangible, ordinary pleasure, the joy available in the here and now. [Page 92]

Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature.” [Page 100]

Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to [Orwell], and pleasures. […] Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored. That is, such writing is beautiful in itself, and beautiful in what flows from it. [Page 231]

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a twelve year old on a ten-hour flight between New York and Tel Aviv, alternating between reading a few more horrifying pages and staring blankly at the 747 bulkhead. I have avoided George Orwell ever since, even though the last few years have proved him more and more prescient. Rebecca Solnit fills in the background of how he came to write such a dark book shortly before his death from tuberculosis at 46, and shows him as a whole, extraordinary person.

Recommended to anyone who wants to be a better, more informed citizen of the world.

Available at bookshop.org.