Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Elena Ferrante (1)

In the Margins by Elena Ferrante

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“Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I am going to talk to you about the desire to write and the two kinds of writing, it seems to, I know best, the first compliant, the second impetuous.” There’s probably going to be a whole series of literature that stems from the pandemic (and already has) and then a further subset of that literature where something was upended by the pandemic. Here, we have a series of lectures originally planned to be delivered live from Elena Ferrante — […]

Yasmina Reza (1)

The Unexpected Man by Yasmina Reza

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“Bitter. It’s all so bitter.” This is a play from the mid-1990s, and you might otherwise know Yasmina Reza from her play “God of Carnage”, which involves two sets of pretentious upper-class parents duking it out after a playground incident of violence. I have also read her play “Art” which tackles some of the more silly questions related to the contemporary art world. This play only involves two people, passengers on the same train, and is primarily their internal monologues that are dominating their thoughts […]

Clint Smith (1)

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

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“The sky above the Mississippi River stretched out like a sky.” This is a book that seeks out physical spaces tied to slavery in the US, look into the ways they tell (or don’t tell) the history upon they’re situated, and ask questions about how that history is told, by whom, and to whom. The book begins with Clint Smith visiting Monticello, the plantation estate built by Thomas Jefferson overlooking the area around Charlottesville. If you go there now, the estate’s history is told through […]

Charles M Blow (1)

The Devil You Know by Charles M Blow

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“On a cold October day, I drove to the South Side of Chicago to meet a man some called the griot” This book by Charles M Blow is subtitled “A Black Power Manifesto” and going into the book, not looking up remotely what it was about I was curious about what that might mean. I read it because I’ve seen and read and liked a lot of Charles Blow’s writing over the years. The book also came out within the last two or so years, […]

Michael Eric Dyson (1-2)

Long Time Coming by Michael Eric Dyson

Unequal by Michael Eric Dyson; Marc Favreau

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Long Time Coming A lot of Michael Eric Dyson books are generally the same, with updated topics and examples. That’s not exactly true, as sometimes he focuses on figures like Tupac, Martin Luther King, or Jay-Z in order to talk about broader issues or to focus on a very specific issue. In this book, it’s more like his other common type of writing like in Race Rules or Tears We Cannot Stop, which are almost jeremiads about contemporary topics. What’s interesting about reading the older […]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (1)

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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“The Anglo-Americans’ settlers’ violent break from Britain in the late eighteenth century paralleled their search-and-destroy annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee, and Miami, during which they slaughtered families without distinction of age or gender, and expanded the boundaries of the thirteen colonies into unceded Native territories.” This is a small history of the Second Amendment in the United States focusing almost entirely on the cultural arguments behind it, and not the political ones. Dunbar-Ortiz is responding to some general analyses that have been […]



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