Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not a Meal to Remember

Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg

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Reading this book was a bit like saving up to go to a really nice restaurant only to have the  the food be overpriced and underwhelming. The book uses the relationship between Totenberg and Ginsburg as the hook to get you to buy/read the book. The book is really the autobiography of Nina Totenberg, but her approach is to weave her career and personal life together with Ginsburg’s. The technique doesn’t work. Totenberg is too deferential to Ginsburg to say anything other than Ruth was […]

It just blew me away!

The Story of the Saxophone by Lesa Cline-Ransome

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I found the most interesting picture book about saxophones. Well, not so much about the instrument itself but how it all came to be. You see, The Story of the Saxophone is not as dull as you would think. And it did not start with the people who are famous for playing it. No, it started in the 1840s in Belgium of all places. Somehow, this odd looking contraption would make it across the ocean to Mexico and finally to New Orleans where Sidney Bechet and Charlie […]

The wonder of women

Wonderful Women of the World by Laurie Halse Anderson

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Biographies by various authors and illustrators to show the real Wonder Women of the world are on the pages of the graphic novel, Wonderful Women of the World. From names you know (the Williams sisters, Greta Thunberg) to people you might not have heard of (Teara Fraser, Francisca Nneka Okeke), we fly, learn water is weird, and learn how to be ourselves through our love, expressions and fighting. There are several extras and author biographies included. This is not an easy read, but a thoughtful and […]

A Straightforward But Fascinating Autobiography

This Much is True by Mariam Margolyes

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Best for: People interested in a very comprehensive life history of a well-known character actress. In a nutshell: Author Margolyes shares stories of her 80 years, starting before the beginning up through the pandemic to today. Worth quoting: While this was an audio book, this one caught me so I had to write it down: “When people say to me ‘oh I never talk about money, religion or politics’ I say ‘what the fuck do you talk about then? Those are the things that matte!” […]

What it is like to be a female firefighter

Fighting Fire by Caroline Paul

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Fighting Fire (1998) by Caroline Paul is a memoir of Paul’s experiences as one of the first women on the San Francisco Fire Department. Back in the late 1980’s, after a number of sexist and racist incidents, the Court required the department to diversify. Caroline Paul was seen at a gym and recruited. Paul had graduated from Stanford. She volunteered at a public radio station in Berkeley, and her twin sister was the Baywatch star: Alexandra Paul. Caroline was definitely not your typical firefighter, but despite […]

“Towards the end of my first time in Indonesia I stayed in a house on the edge of the jungle and dreamed the worst nightmares I have known since I was a child.”

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry

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CBR15Bingo: Asia & Oceania (all about Indonesia and experiencing the uprising that unseated Suharto) I picked this up because I loved The People Who Eat Darkness, Parry’s later work about trying to catch a murderer in Japan. It is such a great book that I’ve been wanting to read other work by him, so I was happy to find out that he’d written this part memoir, part on the spot reporting about the time he’d spent in Indonesia as a young journalist. I didn’t know […]



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