Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

America is in the Heart

America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

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The newer edition of this book comes with a long introduction by the scholar E. San Juan Jr and then an additional shorter introduction by the novelist Elaine Castillo, known for her novel America is Not in the Heart. Both add some important and significant contributions to the novel. The scholarly introduction helps to place the novel critically and historically, while the writerly introduction helps to place the novel culturally within the continuum of Philippine-American literature. The novel itself is heavily autobiographicaly in its approach, […]

In the American Grain

In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams

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A truly strange book I kept seeing quoted in a recent literary criticism book I read. This book looks at the history of US letters from Leif Ericksen through the Civil War and attempts to write a kind of impressionistic history of that field. One of the weird things about American literature is how dominant fiction, poetry, and drama are in our thinking about it now, but basicall before Cooper and Irving, there was very little fiction happening, or rather, much of the fiction we […]

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon

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This book is not a micro-history of the post-Reconstruction South and Jim Crow Era in the leadup to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, but it does end up covering a lot of that territory well. The book instead focuses on the various forms of re-enslavement that various states saw in the 1880s-1910s or so, heavily focused on the debt peonage, where someone was imprisoned and enthralled to a specific person in order to work off a debt. This system, and it […]

Double Blind and Spook Country

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn

Spook Country by William Gibson

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Double Blind – 2/5 Sometimes I read a book and I wish I listened to the audiobook. Not that I always feel this way, but throughout this book I kept feeling I might give it a better shrift if I had listened to it. Reading it though, I felt my experience of it to be quite anemic and my reaction to the book was lukewarm at the best and slightly antagonistic at worse when it came to to ways in which St Aubyn handled some […]

The Big Sea

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

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The introduction to this memoir written by Arnold Ramperstad tells us that Langston Hughes avoided writing his memoir when first asked to do so in his early 20s until he felt like he had lived long enough to have a story to tell. This is false modesty probably because the story he has is pretty wild already. Ramperstad also tells us that Hughes pulls some of his punches, especially his Communist-ties punches from several of his stories and poems, and well the memoir is not […]

The Half has Never Been Told

The Half has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist

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Reviews that suggest that this book is simply an oral history that do more to explain the deprevaity of slavery than to explain the economics of slavery, almost certainly did not read much beyond the introduction. The book goes extensively into the ways in which slavery was protected and implemented in every new territory it was allowed to, how the system was integral to the economy of the North, the South, and the West, as well as markets in Europe, and how the legal battles […]



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