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:

A Place That Had No Memories, Nothing

The Decay Of The Angel (The Sea of Fertility Book 4) by Yukio Mishima

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In the late 1960s, Honda, now 76 years old, encounters a 16-year-old orphan, Toru, whom he believes to be the next reincarnation of Kiyoaki. He decides to adopt him and take him into his home as his heir, offering an education, wealth, and status, all the while wondering and waiting whether Toru will die at twenty years of age like his predecessors did. I did not know what to expect after the surprising turn the story took in the third book, and it would have […]

Something to Write About

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

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For 30 years, Frank McCourt taught English and later Creative Writing in various high schools in New York City. He shares anecdotes about his experiences in some very different schools, and stories about his own life during those years, and how all that finally led to him writing his first book, Angela’s Ashes, which won a Pulitzer Prize, at the age of 66. At first glance, this should be a good book. It’s funny and heartwarming, but occasionally tragic and thought-provoking. There are a bunch […]

“Such a Device Could Not Exist.”

Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer by Jo Marchant

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In 1900, just off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera and at a depth of about 45 metres, a group of sponge divers discovered the wreck of a Roman cargo ship. Among the bronze and marble statues, pottery, and jewellery that were retrieved in the next months, there was also an artefact that would puzzle scientists for the next hundred years: the Antikythera mechanism. At first, it was dismissed as just a lump of wood and metal, but when a gear was discovered […]

An Impenetrable Cloud Was Lifted

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M. M. Blume

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In August 1946, The New Yorker dedicated an entire issue to John Hersey’s essay Hiroshima, which told the stories of six people who survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Blume provides the background to Hersey’s work: how the government tried to cover up or at least downplay the extent of the destruction and suffering unleashed on a largely civilian population, how Hersey managed to get the story anyway, and how it finally came to be published. Despite covering a heavy subject, this is a […]

Bridging the Firmament of Death

The Temple Of Dawn (The Sea of Fertility Book 3) by Yukio Mishima

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On a business trip to Thailand, 6 years after Isao’s death and shortly before Japan enters WWII, Honda encounters the young princess Ying Chan who claims to be the reincarnation of a Japanese man. 12 years later, in 1952, he meets her again, but is unsure whether she really is the reborn Kiyoaki or not. After focussing on Kiyoaki in the first book, and his reincarnation into Isao in the second one, the third book surprisingly shifts its gaze to Honda instead of the next […]

Not the Forgotten One Anymore

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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If you thought the biggest disaster of the 20th century was WWII, then Laura Spinney would like to correct you, because the Spanish Flu may have killed more people than WWI and WWII combined. Death rates were relatively low in Western countries, but in many other areas of the world people died at much higher rates due to worse health care and hygienic conditions. The book was first published in 2017 and Spinney laments the fact that the Spanish Flu is the forgotten pandemic; ironically, […]



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