survival story

“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

“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.

“North to Freedom” by Anne Holm

January 21, 2022 by Sonia Connolly 2 Comments

This is one of the books I’ve carried from place to place since I was a kid. I took it down from the shelf to see if it was time to pass it along, and ended up reading the whole thing. I didn’t remember much about the plot, but a few fragmentary scenes had stayed with me. It was published in 1963 in Danish, and translated into English in 1965.

A twelve-year-old child named David has been raised in a concentration camp, escapes with the puzzling help of the Commandant, and is now crossing Europe alone to get to Denmark. He is sturdy, quick-witted, and speaks several languages, having learned them from various fellow prisoners.

The writing is emotionally authentic without trying to terrify the reader. David talks about his fear, and also how he has learned to calm himself. He passes through hope and despair. He learns to be more present in his body, and connects passionately to the beauty of the land around him. He also connects tentatively, warily, with other humans.

People see him with compassion and help him on his way, and also see the strangeness in him. With his mix of social ignorance and calm self-possession, it’s obvious he hasn’t had a normal childhood.

In passing, David is noted as a rare name, which was surprising since it has been in the top 35 names since 1880 in the US, and was ranked first in 1960. I have been in a mid-size software engineering organization that literally had more Davids than women. Apparently it was less popular in Denmark in the 1960s.

When I last read the book, I was around David’s age, and simply accepted the plot. Now I see the underlying social and religious messages (added with a light hand), and the overall metaphor for healing from abuse and reconnecting with people.

David values intelligence and devalues people for being “stupid.” I could see a twelve-year-old boy having that attitude, and I wish the author had made it clear that intellectual ability does not correlate with intrinsic moral value. There is also some borderline fat-judgment. David tends to see people as all bad or all good. The plot does engage with the ambiguity of people who are both.

Highly recommended, despite those caveats.

Available at bookshop.org.