Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Claudius the God

Claudius the God by Robert Graves

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It took a little while into this second volume of Robert Graves’s historical novel about the life and reign of emperor Claudius (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus), who becomes emperor at the very end of the first volume, much to his chagrin. It’s clear at the end when we get some source material added in the kinds of sources Graves used for his novel, in which sections are partially lifted. One example is a speech Claudius gives in which in the middle of his argument, […]

The Hunger Angel

The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller

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This is a more recent novel by Herta Mueller who won the Nobel Prize in 2009, soon after this novel came out. The epilogue and author’s note mentions that this began as a work in collaboration between Mueller and a poet whose experience overlap the subject of the poet’s experiences in a Soviet camp after the fall of Romanian in 1945. The novel circulates around the experiences of a young man from Romania who is captured and imprisoned by the new Soviet leadership when the […]

An Honest Living

An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

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The novel begins in New York in the early 2010s when our narrator takes up a case related to an upcoming divorce. This takes him to the world of book collecting. He’s been asked by a woman to find evidence that her husband has or is planning to sell off legal transcripts (a particular item in book collecting). He poses as a collector and receives a list of texts and an offer to sell, the evidence he needs. We learn that he’s a disaffected lawyer […]

Witches and Jesuits

Witches and Jesuits by Garry Wills

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Garry Wills has a Phd in Classics, but has mostly spent his public career writing about politics, religion, and history. He’s most famous probably for a fallout with the “intellectual Conservatism” movement in the early seventies when he wrote a polemic against Nixon. He also won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1990s for a book about the Gettysburg Address. In this book, he begins his study of Macbeth by asking the question: why do so many performances of Macbeth fail? He doesn’t exactly ever […]

Well the kids have to learn about TekWar sooner or later.

TekWar by "William Shatner"

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The made for television movie of TekWar came out when I was in late elementary school or middle school and I was hooked. I loved it. I had no idea what was going on, but it involved a computer drug that people tapped into that let people experience whatever they wanted for a price. It also involved a cryogenically frozen ex-cop who was framed for dealing Tek and who was let out in order to do…something. If all this sounds vaguely familiar, well, maybe you’ve […]

The Gates of Europe

The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy

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This book was on sale on Audible a while back and seemed like the perfect kind of book to settle up my sense of Ukranian history. This part of the world as a whole is a big hole in my knowledge and for obvious reasons I wanted a separate history of Ukraine. The book is about as straight-forward as you could want, and the publication is timed with the recent Maidan Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, which was in reaction to a series of corrupt […]



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