Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Johnstown Flood

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

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This is David McCullough’s first book, published in 1968, and relatively (or more so comparatively) small in size and scope from his later, much longer books. This takes on the history of the Johnstown Flood, not only one of the worst flooding disasters in American history in terms of damage and loss of life, but also one of the first natural disasters (however natural you want to call this one) that captured national attention as a kind of media blitz. This book begins with some […]

The Octopus

The Octopus by Frank Norris

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This 1901 novel by Frank Norris feels quite squarely with a foot in both the 19th and 20th centuries, and of course in publication in 1901 suggests that it quite literally does. The book is subtitled “A Story of California”, so it has the trappings of California novels — references to the old Spanish inhabitants, a blending of American and Mexcian people, culture, food, a reverence for the land, wine, and a struggle between the greatest potential of lived experience and the truly harrowing exploitation […]

Regeneration through Violence

Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 by Richard Slotkin

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The opening part of a three part book series, and what feels like was written initially with this book only in mind, this cultural history by Richard Slotkin takes on the notion of “myth making” in American history and literature. The book was published in the early 1970s, so it predates (and perhaps prefigures) a few seminal post-modernist texts like Lyotard’s Postmodernism, so the terminology some times feels a little lacking. What is not lacking is the thoroughness of the reading and the thoroughness of […]

A Land so Strange

A Land so Strange by Andrés Reséndez

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This is a short history providing a lot of context and background and additional sources to one of the more famous captivity narratives published from the New World during the colonization of the Americas. This book follows the journey of Cabeza de Vaca, a mostly low level Spanish finance official who joins a voyage to America alongside about 300 other people. Of the 300, four would survive, and that would come after eights years of the voyage during which he acts as a colonizer, a […]

Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie

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This is the first and only collection of short stories that Agatha Christie published with Tommy and Tuppence. The married spies and sometime crime solvers first showed up in The Secret Adversary in 1922, Christie’s second novel. There’s three more novels, and the one that I’ve read so far N or M, feels like a dramatic tone shift from these first two books. That’s in part because they become a kind of stand-in for Christie’s own sense of purpose being waylaid by WWII. They want […]

Last two I guess

The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip Jose Farmer

Black Stars by Nisi Shawl; Victor LaValle; Nnedi Okorafor; Nisi Shawl; CT Rwizi; Chimamanda Adichie

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Fabulous Riverboat – 4/5 Stars In this follow-up, we have Sam Clemens deciding that he’s going to use the height of his power and 19th century technology to build himself a huge riverboat to cruise the long river in the center of the world, searching ala Inferno for his lost love. That said, the woodburning 19th century boat is offered some interesting upgrades via 20th and 21st century people in Riverworld. And like with the first book, the racial politics that were at play in […]



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