Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

How Am I Just Learning This Now?!

Period Power by Maisie Hill

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Best for: Anyone who menstruates and wants to know how they can use their cycle to their advantage. In a nutshell: Author Hill looks at different aspects of one’s menstrual cycle, as well as different challenges and complications people face and how to possibly address them. Worth quoting: “The mental switch you need to make is to realise that your feelings here are very real and have nothing to do with your hormones, but your hormones are helping you to give voice to them, and […]

An intimate portrait of the life of a polar bear

Ice Walker by James Raffan

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Non-fiction disguised as fiction. Plot: Nanu is a polar bear fresh from a miscarriage because she hadn’t packed on enough weight last summer to carry her pregnancy to term. We follow her from feeding herself, mating, hibernation, pregnancy, and taking care of her cubs, all while the ice gets thinner, the food less plentiful, and the growing danger from humans. Raffan started his career in the hard sciences and bailed real quick after he saw the kind of things you had to do to science […]

Outland- Escapist Apocalypse

Outland by Dennis E. Taylor

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When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it’s up to six college students and their experimental physics project to prevent the end of civilization. When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland—an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away. Then everything changes […]

Pest? A Matter of Perception

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire

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  What defines a pest, really? What makes one animal seen as a loveable little critter that we want to share our space with and the other an irredeemable menace marked for eradication?  In Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, Bethany Brookshire attempts to answer this question by giving us a cultural history of our relationship with these species we deem ‘pest-y’ and what makes us so quick to assign them a villainous role.   One of things that really stood out to me is […]

Smokey the Bear was Wrong

The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

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The Great Fire of 1910 burned 3 million acres in Western Montana, Northern Idaho, parts of Washington and British Columbia. The fire burned in  newly created national forests including the Bitterrroot, Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai and Lolo. Timothy Egan tells the story of the fire and the larger story of the creation of public lands through the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt, forester Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. The politics of resource conservation and the role of fire are certainly relevant now, particularly with the additional complexities […]

Judging a book by its cover worked in my favor this time

For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

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I picked up this book based entirely on the title and cover for the Read Harder challenge. I had no idea what to expect, but this was such a good get. I checked out the audiobook version read by the author from my local library, but I absolutely will be purchasing a physical copy for myself. I have a very storied past with religion, and my journey of deconstruction continues to this day; despite no longer being religious, I frequently find myself missing religion. More […]



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