Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Faith opened her book in good earnest and the full tide of death flowed everywhere around us.”

The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly

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I love when you read two different books on the same events and you immediately pick up on the bias each other has. When I reviewed Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, Scanlan held that the most Ireland could possibly blame England for was “misguided politics”; Kelly holds that the political decisions were the least they could be blamed for.Kelly also went far further into Irish history and culture, as well as the emigrant experience upon leaving Ireland, and how […]

“The failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the root of every racial caste system”

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

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This will be a short review, as I cannot do justice to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This brilliant and searing book has given me so much to think about, that I can’t sort it into a neat review at this time. This is a book that I will be thinking about for months, if not years. The New Jim Crow traces the formation of racial caste in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow to […]

Power and the Written Word

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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I once had a housemate who tried to teach me some simplified Chinese written characters (hanzi). Nothing too complex, just me 我, you 你, coffee 咖啡 and tea 茶, so on and so forth. But even with such an easy lesson, I realized that some connections were harder to make than others. I was able to match the the vocalization to the meaning: Wǒ is I/me. And I would see 我 written on the page and go ahead and think ‘yes, that’s I/me’. But that […]

Fun and Games in Tudor England

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

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What is this, Tatooine?  Is not Tudor England the most outrageous wretched hive of scum and villainy one can ever imagine?  Friends, it is that, hands down. This tale, one of the many involving King Henry the Eighth, who is most famous for being the fat guy who was Queen Elizabeth 1st’s father, focuses on his second queen, the first beheaded one.  (Ain’t gonna lie, ain’t gonna cry.)  But mostly it is the story of the Boleyn siblings, Anne, Mary and George.  These three never […]

Over 700 words and I didn’t say what I wanted to

Silence, Full Stop: A Memoir by Karina Shor

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WARNING: several trigger moments. When you get about a third of the way into a book and you know if you like it or not is an odd sensation. But a helpful one. Afterall, if you really really do not like it, you can stop and nothing is really lost. And if you like it, you can continue and nothing is lost but mostly it’s all gain. But what about that book (it might be rare) but you don’t like anything but you don’t hate […]

“My son, I loved my native land with energy and pride ‘Til a blight came over all my crops and my sheep and cattle died”

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine by Padraic X. Scanlan

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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by the pathogen phytophthora infestans. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and causing millions more to emigrate. It was not until 2020 that the population of Ireland hit pre-Famine levels again. Padraic X. Scanlan covers how Ireland got to the point of the majority of its inhabitants being solely dependent on the potato crop […]



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