Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About blauracke

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Loves books. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: blauracke's Quick Questions interview.)

blauracke's Reviews:

I Am Used to Going Astray

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge

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One year before his death in 1828 at the age of 31, Franz Schubert composed the song cycle Winterreise, 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller set to music for voice and piano. Ian Bostridge, a tenor who has performed Winterreise many times, shares his obsession and fascination with this seminal work of the Lied genre in this book. In every one of the 24 chapters one song is discussed in depth, and the wide variety of topics touched on by the author is simply astounding. Much […]

For the Planetary Good – A Survival Guide

Turning the Tide on Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again by Lucy Siegle

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers approximately 1,6 million square kilometres, plastic has been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on Earth, and by 2050 there could be more pieces of plastic in the ocean than fish. These are the facts Lucy Siegle tells us in the first part of this book, along with the backstory of the plastic dilemma, the truth about recycling, and the way plastic is pushed on us by retailers and manufacturers. In the second […]

“What is a whole life? If you die when you’re still a child, is your life whole or half or zero?”

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

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When a boy suddenly vanishes in a slum in India, 9-year-old Jai, who likes to watch police shows on TV, decides to solve the case with the help of his friends Pari and Faiz. While they try to look for clues over the next few weeks, more children go missing which causes the already existing tension between Muslims and Hindus to increase dangerously. A corrupt and indifferent police, extreme poverty, religious and ethnic conflicts, the constant threat of the neighbourhood being demolished, child labour, and […]

“There is no moral. I just felt like telling you a story.”

Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John

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After having to abandon the gang of homeless boys he was a part of, the street kid Dantala ends up in the mosque of the moderate Sheikh Jamal and is offered food, shelter, and a religious education. Gradually, he becomes one of the sheikh’s most trusted assistants, while at the same time, the sheikh’s previous right-hand man forms a radical movement that threatens the fragile peace between the different sects in this region of northwestern Nigeria. Under the guise of a coming-of-age story, Elnathan John […]

In an Occupied Country

The Shadow Killer (Reykjavík Wartime Mystery 2) by Arnaldur Indriðason

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In 1941, a travelling salesman is found murdered and with a swastika painted on his forehead in a flat in Reykjavík. The local detective Flóvent is joined in his investigation by Thorson, a member of the military police, when the murder weapon is identified as the gun of an American soldier. The real protagonist of this book, however, are not the two investigators, but wartime Iceland, with American and British soldiers invading the small country in great numbers and changing pretty much everything for the […]

Every Empire Must Fall

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

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Starting with the end of the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and ending with the death of Sulla in 78 BC, Mike Duncan explains how the groundwork for the end of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Roman Empire in 27 BC had already been laid in this earlier period. There are a few easily identifiable and only too familiar ailments that plagued Rome in the middle of the 2nd century BC, namely a rising economic inequality, […]



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