psychology

“Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

February 4, 2026 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
Recommended to me by: Amy Bennett

This book is a brilliantly written educational tool, including full transparency about the techniques it is using to bring the reader new ideas in the face of very sophisticated defenses. The first few chapters earnestly present the risks of reading the rest of the book, and offer practices to remain grounded and centered while reading stories that question basic assumptions about our reality.

Vanessa Machado de Oliviera uses stories from her own life as a mixed-race person in South America who now works in academia, in addition to deep political analysis to describe the twists and tricks of modernity, the way it consumes us and alters our thinking so that it seems inevitable and unquestionable. She uses metaphors and exercises to encourage new ideas to take root.

One of the exercises is to imagine oneself as a bus with varied passengers, and to pay attention to who is driving, who is giving suggestions to the driver, and who is in the back of the bus, not directly affecting the choice of direction, but still present. She asks, where is modernity on your bus, and what does it have to say.

I thought about that as I biked to an errand, and at first modernity seemed very distant. Then I realized it is standing by the driver and talking constantly about what I’ve done wrong and how I need to be productive and earn enough to deserve to live, etc. etc.

Modernity is tricky and slippery and we’ve all been steeped in it, so even when we think we have renounced and defeated it, we are engaging in battles and black & white thinking that are part of it. Thus we want to honor it both outside and inside ourselves as it goes through its death throes and makes way for something new that is hopefully more nourishing and healthy for us all.

I got this book from the library, but I think I need to buy a copy. It is a book to sit with and revisit and go back to. Highly recommended

Author’s website including videos of the author discussing her work.

Available at bookshop.org.

“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.

“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.

“You Just Don’t Understand” by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.

August 31, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Women and Men in Conversation

Recommended to me by: a friend

My friend was telling me about a gathering where one person had a knee injury. All the women who stopped to chat with the injured person asked how she was doing and how she had gotten injured. All the men talked about their own knee injuries or other injuries they had experienced. My friend said the men were trying to save the injured person’s pride and equalize status by saying they had gotten injured too. I sputtered that that was a very generous interpretation, but I didn’t necessarily agree. She recommended this book.

The book was published in 1990, and it shows. There is an updated edition from 2007, but I got the older edition from the library.

Tannen’s thesis is that women talk to support intimacy, and men talk to compete for status. The first half of the book has many examples, without ever mentioning sexism or cultural influences, not to mention non-binary people. Men protect their independence at the same time as women are trying to build connection, causing discord in heterosexual relationships.

Just about when I was going to stop reading in frustration, Tannen says that Italian preschoolers of any gender debate heatedly with each other, because that is what Italian culture teaches and expects. She also talks about New York Jewish culture, where both women and men are more direct and outspoken, and less direct people interpret that as being rude and pushy.

Then she talks about sexism, where men who are direct and authoritative are interpreted as being powerful and appropriately masculine, whereas women are seen as overstepping their bounds and being arrogant or aggressive. She talks about how the press talked about Geraldine Ferraro in disparagingly gendered terms “but they didn’t mean to.” I wonder if she wanted to retract that generous interpretation after seeing how the press treated Hillary Clinton.

At the very end, she says that she is not advocating for anyone to change their style, but to keep in mind these differences and be open to believing in people’s good intentions. Like any less-dominant group, I think women already understand the status-oriented style quite well, and men need to pick up the slack by learning to work better with a collaborative style.

The book does have a few nods toward Not All Men, and Not All Women. It mentions gay and lesbian relationships once that I noticed. It has a terribly racist description of communication styles in a Mayan community in Mexico that I can only hope is improved in the 2007 edition.

My friend did a great job of summarizing the primary takeaway of the book (women talk for connection, men talk for status). It’s a useful thing to listen for.

Available at bookshop.org.