Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Son of the Morning Star by Evan S Connell

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Evan Connell is primarily known as a novelist — Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, et al — but he’s kind of a journeyman American letters guy who was interesting in a lot of different stories, ideas, histories, and places. This popular history of George Custer fits right along those. Custer occupies a curious spot in American history and speaks to some specific contrasts in American culture, if not straight up paradoxes or antimonies. Something that is often lost (at least to me) is the Custer stories […]

Clay’s Ark

Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler

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This is a re-read and still a four-star book for me. Something there is in Octavia Butler books where she invents a wild new world, plays around in it in the most dreary and upsetting ways, never makes me feel too out of sorts, and even includes a lot of uncomfortable sexuality in the books, and they still just remain a joy to read. Not a joy in like….joyful, but deeply satisfying and enjoyable. These four books that comprise the Patternmaster books can definitely be […]

The Next Civil War (A Fiction)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

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I spent almost the entire of this book trying to figure out if it’s any good or not. My issue is not actually political. A lot of the reviews seem to take offense with the idea that the most likely perpetrators of the “next civil war” will be right-wing terrorists. Well, get over it. When that happens, you’ll be so happy you won. They also mention that he’s glowing about BLM, which is simply not true. He simply states that their grievances are founded in […]

Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63

Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch

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This is the first of three biographical/historical volume about Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement in general from the historian Taylor Branch. Some context for the books. This first volume came out in 1990, and was partially being written at the time when Reagan enshrined the federal holiday for King. And thus began the era of white conservatives scolding Black people about King’s legacy, that they completely fabricate in their heads. Reagan of course spent a lot of his time as governor […]

Jubilee

Jubilee by Margaret Walker

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This is novel is based on the author’s ancestors (or whatever is the best term for past relatives not that deep in the past ultimately). The story primarily follow Vyry, a mixed race woman born into slavery as the product of her white owner/father raping her mother. The story begins in Georgia before the Civil War, carries through the war, following the connections between the Black slaves and the white owners, and then spends about half or more of the rest of the novel in […]

The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

The Pilot and the Passenger by Leo Marx

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One of the things I try to teach my high school students taking college writing is that depending on the field of study and the research topic, that older scholarship sometimes needs to be handled as an historical document more so than a scholarly document. One of the things that’s great about English literature scholarship is that the window is much much wider for this gray area. I find that a lot of older scholarship, especially from the 1930s-1960s misses a lot of important later […]



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