Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Reconciliation with Canada’s colonial past and its legal systems

Braiding Legal Orders by John Borrows

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Braiding Legal Orders is a compilation of essays by legal professionals of various areas of expertise who offer a unique insight into the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and how to take it from a non-binding international instrument and into a legal principle fully integrated with domestic legal systems. The most obvious concept here is of course that to truly integrate Indigenous governance, they must actually carry legal weight, and have distinct jurisdictional authority. This is of course simpler said than […]

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

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This description of this book on Amazon is “an account of the unbridgeable gulf between a family of Hmong refugees and their American doctors.” It is that!  And it is also more than that. Heart-wrenching and illuminating, it’s also about culture and love and pride and science and humanity. Lia Lee, a Hmong child whose family moved to California, suffered from epilepsy. Her first seizure was when she was only months old. When her parents took her to the hospital, there was a total language […]

Lee Miller’s War

Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke

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Model, muse, photographer, war correspondent – Lee Miller wore many hats and lived many lives, and along the way intersected with major figures in the Surrealist movement. Lee Miller had the tumultuous sort of life that makes for fascinating reading, and considering I knew very little about her past the famous picture of her bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, everything I read was a revelation. She worked so closely with more prominent artists of the Surrealist movement as both model and collaborator that it astounds me […]

A Perfectly Cromulent Book

Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television - and America - Forever by Allan Siegel

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The Simpsons has been on the air long enough that it’s best joke about being a long-running TV show, The 138th Episode Spectacular, aired nearly 30 years ago. A book covering the entire lifespan of the show would be quite long and probably be a pretty depressing read for the last two-thirds or so, given the general consensus of the show’s level of quality. Luckily, The Ringer’s Alan Siegel has confined himself to the show’s “Golden Era” a nebulous concept he seems to define as […]

“The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

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Having been curious about the “Radium Girls”, it was interesting to read a book dedicated solely to them (I had previously read about them in passing in both The Poisoner’s Handbook and A Beautiful Poison). I just wish the writing was not so “rah! rah! rah! Stars and Stripes Forever”, going into the plucky, industrious, indomitable spirit of the women. So basically I spent the entire book having either or in my mind and it was slightly distracting. And also horrible, because this is not […]

We all know it’s bad for us

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

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I’m not sure when I first heard of The Anxious Generation (2024) by Jonathan Haidt, but it sounded interesting. So, I listened to it on audiobook from my library. This book discusses how much damage phones and social media have done to children as they grow up. It goes on to make recommendations for healthy ways for young people to engage with social media. Finally, Haidt points out that kids are watched over too closely. They need independence and free play in order to gain confidence and […]



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