Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Norman Mailer (2-3)

Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer

The Deer Park by Norman Mailer

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Advertisements for Myself “Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.” No one loves Norman Mailer’s writing more than Norman Mailer. No one hates Norman Mailer’s writing more than Norman Mailer. This book is a kind of collected work from Norman Mailer, but really only a decade or so into his […]

Dario Fo (3-4); Franca Rame (1-2)

The Open Couple by Dario Fo; Franca Rame

An Ordinary Day by Dario Fo; Franca Rame

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“Don’t be silly, Antonia.” Another farce, this time written with his partner. The situation begins with a husband and wife, with the wife threating suicide and then husband arguing about the correctness of their shifting their relationship into an open marriage. You can see from the opening line quoted above the general tenor of how this goes. The play is farcical and plays around especially with convention and tone. It’s also a short play. The whole play is a back and forth on the topic […]

Susan J Douglas (1)

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media by Susan J Douglas

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“I am a woman of the baby boom, which means my history is filled with embarrassment, littered with images I’d just as soon forget. Old photos of my friends and me in platform shoes or, worse, hot pants, our hair freshly ironed, arm-in-arm with some neanderthal yet highly self-satisfied boyfriend in a surplus army jacket, serve as unforgiving reprimands of how naive and pliable we seemed in our youth” You’ve probably read this book or a book like this. It’s an almost quaint, very 1990s […]

Arthur Schlesinger (1)

The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger

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“For the White House the new year began in gloom.” There’s a casual remark in one of Gore Vidal’s later essays that “No one seems to read The Age of Jackson anymore.” And if you read his novel Burr, which is set right in the middle of it, you see that, indeed, he has. The history is both interesting and strange, and takes some time to think through exactly what it is doing. It is NOT a history of the Jackson presidency, although that plays […]

Calder Willingham (1)

Rambling Rose by Calder Willingham

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On the one hand this book is both really funny and insightful in some significant ways; but on the other hand, it’s a kind of accidentally disturbing book than plays in some ordinary misogyny and casual sexual abuse. Fun! There’s a movie version of this starring Laura Dern in the title role and Robert Duvall as the father, with Lukas Haas as the adolescent narrator. The novel takes place in Georgia during the Great Depression. Our narrator is an adolescent in a more or less […]

J. Anthony Lukas (1)

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Familes by J. Anthony Lukas

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“Sunlight struck the gnarled limbs outside his window, casting a thicket of light and shadow on the white clapboards. From his high desk under the eaves, Colin Diver could watch students strolling the paths of Cambridge Common or playing softball on the neatly trimmed diamond.” This book is a great reminder than whenever someone starts talking about “local control” in politics, referring to education policy, they are talking about segregation. I remember when I was a kid a specific election season (though I don’t remember […]



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