Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X; Alex Haley

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The essential book written by Malcolm X and Alex Haley shortly before his death in 1965, this book tell the story mostly as we know it now. In fact the book came out about six months after he died, something he addresses a few times throughout and then significantly near the end. He did not have any specific illusions about his long-terms health in this country. His is an interesting case too because while he’s an obvious threat to the illusions of peace in this […]

Assata

Assata by Assata Shakur

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Whether you trust her as a narrator or believe her story exactly as she tells it (and I think there’s plenty of reason to believe almost all of her story, and trust most of her story as narrator), it’s hard to come away from this book or any write-up of Assata Shakur’s life and not feel like she was absolutely railroaded by the US government. Sometimes people in liberal-ish circles have a real hard time dealing with ambivalent or worse contradictory feelings about the US. […]

Blood and Thunder

Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides

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This book takes place circa 1845 during the Polk presidency, who is oddly obscured in history because of his status as president prior to the US Civil War, but this relative obscurity belies just how instrumental he was to the westward expansion of the US and to a kind of preparatory set of exercises for the Civil War. If you were to view the US-Mexico War merely as the crucible through which most of the primary figures of the US Civil War were forged and […]

Press Reset and Replay

Replay by Tristan Donovan

Press Reset by Jason Schreier

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Replay – 4/5 I kind of wasn’t looking forward to this book in my library actually, and moved it up my queue to get it out of the way. It turned out that an editorial choice by the author to focus on software that implemented significant changes to the landscape of gaming (focusing on games instead of consoles/platforms) made this book a lot more fun and interesting that I had thought it would be. Too many game histories or books that reference gaming focus on […]

Orientalism

Orientalism by Edward W Said

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This is the second time I have read this book, and the first time since I first read it in grad school fifteen years ago. The book itself is rounding on 45 years old. Reading the introduction written shortly before Said’s death in 2003 and the fifteen year afterward in 1993 ten years earlier some things emerge as criticism of the text, and I will start. I also happened to find an article from the Guardian defending late 19th century Orientalist art that makes the […]

The Peregrine

The Peregrine by JA Baker

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One time I was walking through my city and was crossing through an older industrial/warehouse section of town that in the last 20 years or so had begun the process of being converted into “urban living” with warehouse lofts, bars, and restaurants coming in to replace a set of industries no longer housed here. So to emphasize, not exactly a bucolic setting. I had my headphones in and suddenly an older man who was standing outside of a corner store grabbed my arm and pointed […]



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