Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About elderberrywine

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Elder LOTR/Holmes fan girl/writer since forever.

elderberrywine's Reviews:

Everybody Hates This Guy. Can We Just Pretend the Obvious Murder Was an Accident?

The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

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There is a river that runs through it.  It is the (fictional) Alabaster River, and the town is Jewel, Minnesota.  It is only a decade after the end of WWII, and many men returned home significantly changed.  The town is celebrating Memorial Day when a body is discovered in the river.  The victim is Joseph Quinn, belligerent wealthy landowner and renowned drinker.  He’d been known to occasionally go down to camp overnight by the river.  Perhaps he got drunk and fell in?  Little hard to […]

If You are Hiring Perry Mason? Just Spill It, Sister.

The Case of the Lazy Lover by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Holy moral ambiguity, Batman!  Turns out the actual murderer never gets charged, and we are all fine with that.  Also, Perry’s client did what most of them do, and never really laid the facts out to him.  True, he’s not going to represent them if he’s convinced they are guilty, but the coy runaround never works in their favor, and I can’t blame Perry for getting a little ticked off.  They are usually trying to protect  and plot come out gradually, as Perry tries to […]

Shoulda Stuck to Cars

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin

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This was pretty amazing; I had never heard of this!  In 1927, when Henry Ford was one of the richest people in the world, he bought up over 5000 sq. miles of Amazonian jungle, near a river that fed into the Amazon, near its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean.  The purpose was to establish a rubber plantation; that being one of the raw ingredients that he needed for his autos that he couldn’t obtain domestically.  At the time, most of the world’s rubber production was […]

War. Hunh. What’s It Good For.

The Village of Ben Suc by Jonathan Schell

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Since my high school days, I have been a stanch advocate of magazines.  Fashion, of course, at least back in the day.  (Ah, Seventeen, you were a teen age dream.)  But many others as well.  Fought my way through many a Scientific American.  Roamed the world with National Geographic.  All the generic news magazines, (was definitely Team Time) as well as many of the more partisan sort, although many wussed out as years went by.  But my one tried and true was The New Yorker.  […]

Awesome Title Is Awesome

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

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True story – in 1974, French tightrope walker Phillippe Petit slung a rope from the top of one of the twin Trade Towers in New York City to the other, which was still wrapping up construction.  (I was always uncertain quite how he managed that, but apparently it involved a bow and arrow, incredibly enough.)  He then not only walked across, but ran across, danced across, and just to prove his point, lay down on it mid-span for as one does – all the while […]

Noir with an African Touch

People of the City by Cyprian Ekwensi

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Ekwensi was a Nigerian author, studying in Britain at the time he wrote these tales, originally for radio plays for his fellow Nigerians in Britain.  Nigeria was still a British colony at the time, 1954, but it was in the process of establishing independence, doing so in 1960.  The City referred to is Lagos (although never called that), where Britain had first established itself, in order to stop the slave trade that had been established there.  It soon was an important port for all colonial […]



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