Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Piano player, meet piano maker

What Music!: The Fifty-year Friendship between Beethoven and Nannette Streicher, Who Built His Pianos by Laurie Lawlor

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Though available, read What Music!: The Fifty-year Friendship between Beethoven and Nannette Streicher, Who Built His Pianos via an online reader copy. Laurie Lawlor created a story that is more on the friendship and Beethoven’s life than the actual pianos Streicher built. It is an interesting look into their lives, through an outlet not usually used. While you might learn a few new things about Streicher, overall, there might not be a lot of new for Beethoven. This picture book is not to be considered […]

That Nun!

Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent by Matthew Burgess

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All I am saying is Hippie Nun. You need to read Matthew Burgess’s picture book to learn more! Okay, I will also say that Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent has really cool illustrations that are inspired by Kent and the style of the illustrators mix-media format. There are colors, shapes and all the ins and outs of what you would expect from Kent’s work and life. They are unqiueq detailed and there are hidden pieces of fun (the blue bird […]

Tak Ada Peluru Ajaib / There is No Magic Bullet

Kanker, Biografi Suatu Penyakit by Siddharta Mukherjee; Rahmat Purwono 

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(The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer) It’s now edging onto the last part of the year, and I want to mention my most significant (read: stupid) reading challenge. I had some downtime in Australia earlier this year, and I told myself I was going to try to read something in Indonesian again. That something turned out to be an Indonesian translation of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Or Kanker: Biografi Suatu Penyakit (Cancer: Biography of a Disease). Why this […]

“When love buds between great princes”

Queens of the Age of Chivalry by Alison Weir

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England’s Age of Chivalry was a surprisingly turbulent period marked by coups, civil unrest, and outright war on multiple fronts. We meet five queens in this book, including one of the most reviled and one of the most beloved in all of English history. This is the third book in Alison Weir’s England’s Medieval Queens, in which she profiles the queens of medieval England from the Conquest to (I believe) the end of the War of the Roses. In this book, we meet the queens […]

The Relentless Tragedy of Empress Alexandra

Alexandra: The Last Tsarine by Carolly Erickson

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This is a solid and very readable biography of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, who was the last Tsarina of Russia. I had never read a biography specifically of her, although I did know a lot about her life through my obsession with Edward VII. Alexandra was his niece, and his sister (Alexandra’s mother) Alice’s tragic death through diphtheria has always stuck with me as particularly sad. I did learn some new facts from this book, which is always a plus for me. It also lives up […]

A Solid David Geffen Biography

The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood by Tom King

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I read this after the second volume of James Kaplan’s magisterial biography of Frank Sinatra, so I was in the mood for reading about more horrible men with bad tempers. The Operator is a biography of David Geffen, who has had an extremely broad and influential career in show business. I knew only about Geffen Records going into this book, and it broadened my view of everything he’s been involved in, from helping produce Cats on Broadway to being one of the founders of DreamWorks. […]



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