survival story

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“The Fire Trail” by Maureen Larkin Ustenci

June 4, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Mother’s Journey Through Grieving

Recommended to me by: the author

Maureen Larkin Ustenci lucidly shares the raw shock and shattering grief of losing her beloved only son to sudden death in a mountain lake just after he graduated from high school. She also shares joyful stories of raising him in multicultural Berkeley with her Turkish husband. This is a love letter to her son Efejon, to her husband Mustafa, to the city of Berkeley, and to the community that surrounded them and bore them up in their terrible grief.

The book moved me to tears and also delighted me with its depiction of family members, friends, traveling in Turkey, and raising a child who never stopped talking. It dips into the depths and rises again, acknowledging both unbearable pain and the people who reached out again and again to help them bear it with kindness, generosity, and warmth.

Available at Amazon.

“Katarína” by Kathryn Winter

April 16, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Folk dancing with the author

I was chatting with Kathryn at a folk dance party, and explained how my grandparents had to leave Germany because of the Holocaust. She brightened in recognition and said, “I was a hidden child during the Holocaust.” Like Anne Frank, but she lived. I said, “That must have been hard!” She said no, at the time she thought the work camps were like summer camps.

Her lightly fictionalized memoir is beautifully written, a series of child’s-eye vignettes full of details about life in Slovakia at the time. It is also harrowing to read. Kathryn shows difficult events and physical and emotional pain in response, but doesn’t dwell on it. The child Katarína feels both joy and sorrow strongly, and keeps moving forward with fierce resilience. She survived through both inner strength and luck, through care from others and a loving response to care.

Highly recommended. In this time of rising fascism we need to understand fascism’s detailed cruelty to a child. This happened in living memory. We are well along on the road to it happening again. It needs to stop.

Available via Biblio.com