Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Eleanor Catton (1)

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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“The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five, and sending a long-haul truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below.” I think if I read and reread this book more than once or twice it would grow in my estimation. I really enjoyed it, and there’s […]

Dario Fo (2)

Can't Pay? Won't Pay! by Dario Fo

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“Blimey, home at last. My feet are killing me.” Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Like a lot of good satire, not only is the target of the satire savaged in this play, so too, are the ones whose opinions most closely align. When I think about say Nineteen Eighty Four, in the way that all dystopia is a kind of parody, I think about while there is a direct critique going on in the novel, what is most effective about it is that it’s also a […]

Bruce Norris (1)

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris

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“September 1959. Three o’clock, Saturday afternoon.” In Kevin Kruse’s history of integration in Atlanta in the latte half of the 20th century, he discusses how neighborhood began to first integrate (and then quickly segregate) because of boundary-creep, leading to voting blocks gaining power, and then leading to different kinds of white flight into other neighborhoods and suburbs. Once the the boundary was both successfully broken, and then held, it usually followed a generally familiar pattern. And of course, we’re all familiar with the ways in […]

Norman Mailer (1)

Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer

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“Probably I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order. When I stare into the mirror I am returned a face doubtless more handsome than the original, but the straight nose, the modelled chin, and the smooth cheeks […]

Gore Vidal (5-6)

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal

The Best Man by Gore Vidal

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“‘Old age is a shipwreck’. Like man a ground soldier, General de Gaulle was drawn to maritime metaphors.” Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 This last significant collection of essays by Vidal was published in 2001 around the inauguration of George W Bush. He did publish some smaller texts later, and a kind of end of life memoir before he died, but this is probably the last sizeable work of his before his death in 2012. Like the large collection United States, this book covers literary, political, […]

Ronald C White (1-2); Abraham Lincoln (1-2)

A. Lincoln by Ronald C White

Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural by Ronald C White

Second Inaugrual Address by Abraham Lincoln

Biographical Sketch by Abraham Lincoln

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A. Lincoln – This is a fairly broad, but not overly long biography of Abraham Lincoln. The book comes in at about 800 pages with notes. Some others come in at 720, 1088, 720, 800, and even 2008 pages. So this is “small”? Ronald White calls this book “A. Lincoln” in part because that’s how Lincoln signed his name, and also for the metaphorical gap in our understanding of Lincoln, and the way that people fill in that gap with whatever they seem to want […]



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