Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We Know the Night

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins

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When I hit my formative years, I believe Rollins was mostly in his spoken word phase. I didn’t know anything about Rollins Band or Black Flag yet – I just saw this shirtless old man on mtv, shredded and screaming and intelligent. Most of my brainy musical icons were not aggressive body builders. I can’t imagine Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Buckley stabbing anyone with broken glass. Rollins intrigued. A few years ago, I started reading and listening to longer-form interviews with guys like Rollins, Patton Oswalt, […]

Black Lives Matter.

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This book. Oh, this book. I can’t say enough about it, because it’s timely and one of the most important things ever written. And yet I can’t find what I need to say about it, because there aren’t words enough. I was inspired to read it after seeing faintingviolet’s insightful review, and then when Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award, I raced to the library. In a nutshell, this is a book about being black in the United States. More specifically, it is about […]

Context and Culture for a religious figure

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My friend D, a history major at one of the Seventh-day Adventist colleges in Washington, decided for his book club pick that we’d read a new biography of one of the church founding mothers, Ellen G. White. She’s received a lot of attention from a theological perspective, but she’s barely made any indentation on 19th century American studies from a cultural or historical perspective. I was interested to see what a variety of scholars would produce. I also wanted to read this volume, since my […]

In a room with Jefferson, Wilson, Truman, and Ike, but generally mistaken for a waiter.

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The first I remember hearing about James K. Polk was in my high school US history class. He was described as the greatest president you’ve never heard of, and probably the only president to achieve every goal he set for his administration. Now, I don’t typically speak very highly of my high school history classes (the teacher was given a relatively small canvas on which to paint the picture of history, and he painted with the broadest of brushes), but in this one instance, at […]

Celebrating Someone Else’s Cannonball

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Perhaps my title is misleading; Andy Miller really only read 51 books, he suggests you cross out the subtitle, and his List of Betterment only includes the 50 Great books. Also, his Cannonball took place in 365 not a calendar year for those CBR members who may or may not be purists. Andy Miller loves books, he has spent much of his life reading and an equal amount of time lying about what he has and has not read. He decides to embark on a […]

A world of broken promises lit only by the flames of a burning village.

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First off, my goal was a half-Cannonball. So, yay me! The age of Jackson (roughly 1820-1860) is like a glimpse of movement in an otherwise dark and empty room: poorly understood and full of foreboding. I’m reasonably familiar with the preceding 50 years of US history, and have a more comfortable grasp on the succeeding 70 years, but the 40 years that tie them together isn’t an era I’ve read much about. I know that there were some Indian Wars, and the fervor to push […]



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