Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About AnnaCollier

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Long time reader, first time reviewer. Hoping to write one of these book thingies myself one of these days.

AnnaCollier's Reviews:

The risks and rewards of a life spent in public service

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

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On the surface, Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk is a book about the failures of the Trump administration.  This is why I resisted reading it for a long time, even after it was recommended to me, and even though I like Michael Lewis’s writing in general (I am setting aside the satirical(?) essay in which he gave pointers to men on how to get your wife to give up her high-status career so that she would have more time to pay attention to you, that […]

An abundant world of recipes, most of which I’ll never cook

Vegetable Kingdom by Bryant Terry

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Bryant Terry’s 2020 cookbook Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes presents vegan dishes from a variety of culinary traditions, with a particular emphasis on ingredients and flavors featured in African and African-American cooking.  There are a lot of things to like about Vegetable Kingdom.  I agree with Terry’s idea that plant-based eating has many health and environmental benefits, and I liked that the recipes didn’t fall back on the common assumption that vegetarian recipes must feature a central protein (like tofu or seitan) […]

f-bombs and fire extinguishers

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

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Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here begins as the story of two young women, Lillian and Madison, in their freshman year of high school at a fancy boarding school in the Tennessee mountains.  Madison is the daughter of a wealthy family; Lillian is a scrappy local kid attending on scholarship.  Despite their differences, they become close friends. The story then moves forward about fifteen years (the book is vague on time, both in terms of the relations of events in the book to each other […]

Easy Money, Raging Tempers

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

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You know that old joke about how the majority of New Yorker cartoons could be captioned “Christ, what an asshole!”?  I thought about that a lot while I was reading Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’N’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.  This book chronicles the work of many major directors of the 1970s, including Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), Robert Altman (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), […]

Thanks, I’ll Pass

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

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Normally I try to only post positive reviews here, because who wants to be the person putting more negativity into the world, especially in the current moment?  But I am way behind on reviews so I will say: I did not like this book.  This is probably because I am a philistine.  Roxane Gay loved it!  So did NPR!  And the New York Times! Jami Attenberg’s All This Could Be Yours is the story of a family ruled by Victor Tuchman, a rich, awful man […]

The Grass is Always Greener Near the Deserted Medieval Village

A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym is a writer who, strangely, is best known for being underrated. She published a number of books in the 1950s and 1960s, then fell out of fashion. She made a comeback in the late 1970s when both the literary critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin nominated her when asked by the Times Literary Supplement to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century. A Few Green Leaves was Pym’s final book, published shortly after her death in 1980. Pym […]



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