politics

“How We Show Up” by Mia Birdsong

November 30, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Recommended to me by: Nora Samaran

This is a deeply hopeful book grounded in research and personal stories. The American Dream of individualism, resource extraction, and white supremacy creates separation and suffering. Mia Birdsong explores alternatives that people have created to value connection, cooperation, and community.

As a Black woman, Mia centers Black, queer women and other marginalized people such as people who have experienced homelessness. She appreciates the connections that people weave while surviving oppression, that can lead us all in a direction of ending oppression.

While the American Dream says that we should get our needs met in heterosexual nuclear families, this book celebrates all the different kinds of friendship that can also meet needs for intimacy, safety, and mutual support. Raising kids is easier and healthier for everyone with a larger circle of responsible and trusted adults. People who are ageing can support one another.

Whether in crisis, celebration, or everyday life, we can all weave more connections in our lives where we are seen and loved for who we are.

Highly recommended!

Author’s website. It turns out Mia Birdsong lives right here in Oakland!

Available at bookshop.org.

“What It Takes to Heal” by Prentis Hemphill

November 16, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: How transforming ourselves can change the world

I had to return this to the library before I finished the last few chapters, but it all rang true to me, with clear analysis of the effects of racism and trauma, and clear calls to action for the ways we can move forward and heal the damage. Making the world a better place requires both internal healing and external connections. The organizations working toward social justice struggle with healing the ways people interact with each other inside the organizations as well as taking action out in the world.

Prentis includes stories about their experiences with racism, as well as their experiences with organizing for a better world.

Highly recommended.

Author website: prentishemphill.com

Available at bookshop.org.

Kitchens of Hope by Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton with Lee Svitak Dean

November 16, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: How transforming ourselves can change the world
Recommended to me by: Seeing it on the library “Lucky Day” shelf

This book out of Minnesota is a celebration of immigrant success stories and food from around the world. I haven’t tried any of the recipes yet, but I loved the photos and stories of how people connected with each other and found new places to thrive.

Highly recommended – I’m giving copies for the holidays this year.

Photography by Tom Wallace

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.

“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.

“Recoding America” by Jennifer Pahlka

September 30, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Recommended to me by: my workplace, a federal contractor

I work for a federal contractor as a programmer, so they strongly encouraged us to read this. I can see why! The government project and team I work on use Agile methods and have a strong focus on user-centered design. This book made me appreciate that a lot more.

It explained some of the difficulties that government projects encounter, including the problems with the healthcare.gov launch, the unemployment insurance backlogs at the beginning of the pandemic, and why a new generation of GPS satellites are running old software. Not only does government traditionally subscribe to the old waterfall methodology of requirements, then design, then implementation before users see working software, but it starts earlier with Congress making laws that drive the requirements.

Conservatives have actively pushed digital competence out of the government and said it should be contracted out. Then contractors are given no leeway to do research with users and alter the plan to work better. According to them, creating software is implementation which is entirely separate and considered “lesser” than creating policy, which is the government’s concern.

Jennifer Pahlka and others have been driving a quiet revolution in government, introducing 18F, a group of federal employees who use Agile software techniques and user-centered design to consult on a multitude of projects. Another new group, US Digital Service, also bring technological know-how inside the government.

She describes some of the victories, where individual government employees have been able to push back against the snarls of red tape and create, for example, a streamlined SNAP application in California that allows many more people to successfully apply. Covidtests.gov is another example of a big win, a very simple website that successfully delivers tests to 2/3 of American households, and corrected out of date USPS address database entries along the way.

She mentions that people say the “best” programmers are in the private sector, but there are highly competent people who prioritize service to the public over getting the highest salary, so the government gets the “best” by a different definition. The government also places an active priority on diversity and inclusion, so it gets a wider field of good people.

Highly recommended for people interested in government, software, and the joys and tribulations of CivicTech.

Available at bookshop.org.