Ronni Kahn's A Repurposed Life (Murdoch Books, $32.99) is an intensely personal memoir, in which the author's choices, energy, and foibles take centre stage on her way to creating the food rescue organisation OzHarvest.

The other, Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell's Reconnected: A Community Builder's Handbook (Black Inc, $27.99) seeks to set out the way that social ties in Australia have loosened, and how they might be re-attached.

Ronni Kahn has lived in three countries. Born in South Africa under apartheid, she was sent to Israel to study at 17, and moved to Australia many years after that. Her experiences in South Africa as a child make for sobering reading.

Kahn writes of her early life as a white South African that "(i)t's hard to believe that you can grow up with brutal injustice in front of your face and carry on comfortably living your life. You can". Neighbours of the Kahns were active in the anti-apartheid movement, but her own family's emphasis was on their own safety and well-being.

Her mother's remarkable resilience and practicality after her father suffered a serious accident is emphasised, as is the more negative notion of being "absolutely pragmatic....There was only room for getting on with it". Feelings and creativity were not seen as important.

Kahn was beginning to become more aware of the brutal nature of apartheid when she was sent to Israel, alone, at 17, because there was a scholarship on offer.

The most interesting aspect of Kahn's life in Israel is her time on a kibbutz, where she found that her own choices and wants were side-lined to some degree. She was assigned work more based on gender than skill or talent. The experience of wanting to express herself, while supporting the idea that everyone's needs should be met, form a recurring theme throughout the book.

Kahn arrived in Australia with two children, worked in floristry, and gradually moved into events organising. This is where she became appalled by the waste of food in this business, leading her to start delivering left-over food to refuges.

The first homeless refuge she delivered to "was tucked away behind a Ferrari and Porsche dealership" which sounds like a metaphor for Sydney, if not Australia. From these modest beginnings, Kahn relates the creation of OzHarvest, which is now a major organisation providing many thousands with access to food.

Kahn's humour, energy and honesty shine through in the book. She is not afraid to admit that there were times when she had no idea what to do. For example when told that OzHarvest needed a board of directors, she just asked people she knew to serve on the board without understanding that particular skills were needed. She then had to "un-invite" them.

The author's honesty in writing of how her relationships have affected her, her spiritual and emotional journeys, and even her changes in appearance, is remarkable. Kahn's book gives a feeling for how a great idea and the ability to realise it doesn't come from nowhere, but are the fruits of a life's experience.

A Repurposed Life is fascinating and rich account of a woman's journey towards making a difference to Australian society, and eventually, to other countries, including the reborn South Africa.

Andrew Leigh, as most readers will know, is a Labor MP, representing the Federal seat of Fenner, in the north of the ACT. Along with his adviser, Nick Terrell, he has written a book detailing the way that Australians have become more disconnected from each other in recent times. (Indeed, Disconnected is the name of a previous book by Leigh, published a decade ago.)

The chapter describing the nature of this disconnection is rich in graphs; readers will either love this or struggle their way through them depending on their various tastes. The decline in overall membership of sporting clubs is telling, as is a decrease in the number of volunteers.

After detailing the problems, the book moves on to describe ways that people have, and could, rebuild connections. The chapter on volunteering contains the assertion that "(L)arge-scale emergencies boost social capital" and examines the shocking fires of 2019-20 and the current Covid-19 emergency.

The need to ensure both short-term and long-term benefits to the community is vital, the authors say. And here they "repurpose" (their phrase) a term from Orwell's 1984, "double-plus-good", which they mean to describe a community activity that not only does an immediate good, but has the effect of building long-term community ties.

To this reader, the adoption of a term that was invented to show that the paucity of language leads to the impossibility (or extreme difficulty) of thought outside what is permitted by a totalitarian regime is highly problematic. The term is used frequently in Reconnected, and each time it is encountered readers may think they hear Eric Arthur Blair spinning in his grave.

This is not to say that an author controls the use of a word appearing in his or her book for all time, but rather that some things should not be appropriated so eagerly.

Putting that to one side, however, a discussion of the possible effects of climate change on the community's willingness and ability to volunteer during crises would have greatly enriched this section. (There is no reference to climate change in the index.) Also, changing gender roles, while touched on in the book, are arguably central to any discussion of volunteering.

Barriers to volunteering are discussed, and ways to identify potential volunteers. The pros and cons of using mobile devices to connect people to charities and voluntary movements are examined, too.

Throughout the book, Leigh and Terrell present vignettes of successful community groups in areas as diverse as singing in the pub, dancing, running, gardening, and providing adequate housing that have developed in all parts of Australia.

Other sections of Reconnected examine philanthropy, ways to more fully engage "citizens" in democracy, the possibilities of engagement in churches and other spiritually based groups, and movements to make people feel more at home in their neighbourhoods, to mention but a few of the topics covered in the book.

A vision of a possible "reconnected Australia" ends the work, and some aspects may appeal to even the most curmudgeonly reader.

There is much to like in Reconnected, and there is no doubt that the stories of successful community organisations and charities are inspiring.

In addressing the way that people in Australia seem to have less personal contact with others than ever before, and in suggesting possible solutions, Leigh and Terrell touch on questions of what it means to live in the 21st century. How do we engage with others, and influence the type of society we live in?

A Repurposed Life and Reconnected are both about building a stronger community, where people's needs are met. One is immediately and thoroughly engaging, while the other attempts to act as a kind of diagnosis and repair manual for disconnection. These diverse works demand very different ways of reading.