Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Three Essays by Norman Mailer

Ten Thousand Words a Minute by Norman Mailer

Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots by Norman Mailer

In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention of 1964 by Norman Mailer

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1 There’s a funny part about a later essay in which Norman Mailer self-deprecatingly (or maybe closer to self-loathingly) talks about not knowing nearly as much about boxing as his reputation would have you believe. I am sure it’s more in the middle. Here, we ostensibly are getting an essay about boxing, but more so about boxing writing. Something about sports writing often elevates the sports to places that otherwise watching an event just can’t match. So having Mailer write more about the act of […]

Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond (1997)

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

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The criticism over this book seems both fair and even a little obvious at times. It ranges from “this book goes too far” to “this book doesn’t go to far enough!” The book purports to discuss why some societies fail and others succeed. Diamond mostly looks at the specific factors related to resources, weather, and other features geographically to determine some of the commonalities among societies experiencing certain levels of success. It’s fascinating in a lot of ways, but severely limited in others. For me, […]

Amazon Originals Presents, a mixed bag.

Faraway by Various

Hush by Various

If the South Had won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor

Lost Children by Francesca Lia Block

Trafik by Rikki Ducornet

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A collection of short stories that are either based on fairy tales (like specific ones) or based on fairy tale elements and tropes. So this makes this collection a two-fer in terms of possible issues. The first i s that modern day retellings of fairy tales are very hit or miss. Sometimes they’re great ala Angela Carter and a few others, and sometimes they’re very weak. And the same thing happens in this collection. And of course in any kind of solicited short story collection […]

Summer of Night – Dan Simmons (1991)

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

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A book about a group of adolescents boys (and one girl) who must face down a comic supernatural horror that’s plaguing their town, killing kids, and being ignored by the adults around them. Each child experience their own tailor-made horror, which takes on multiple forms, inhabits and uses vulnerable people, holy water is used as if battery acid to melt a face, and there’s a group of very dangerous bullies also hunting them. But! It takes place in Illinois. I mean Stephen King blurbed this, […]

Cruel and Unusual – Patricia Cornwell (1993)

Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell

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The fourth book in the Kay Scarpetta series and like the previous one, it’s all getting better in certain ways, while this goes to some places that I almost always hate in mystery series. In this novel, we’re months or about year after the previous novel, and we find Kay Scarpetta reflecting on events in her life. She’s also on call because of an upcoming execution, where barring a governor’s intercession she will need to pronounce the death of the infamous killer being put to […]

Being recognized more and more these days….

Harriet Jacobs by Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Frederick Douglass by Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Published right on the eve of the Civil War, this book tells the story of Harriet Jacobs (well, coming into being first), the process of self-discovery, and her story moving toward freedom and the eventual freedom of her children as well. What stands out with this narrative is just how beautifully this memoir is, and how painfully she writes about loss. Her writings about the sexual harassments, sexual exploitation, and sexual violence she experienced both in her […]



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