Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Slayers, sure, but we’re all cookie dough in progress

Slayers, Every One of Us by Kristin Russo, Jenny Owen Youngs

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I have listened to quite a few Joanna Robinson podcasts so I “knew” Kristin Russo from when she has appeared as a guest on them, and also had heard Joanna talk abut Jenny Owen Youngs, the podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer and the songs Jenny made for the each episode (I’m in this weird category of people that enjoys Broadway musical theater but don’t actually enjoy live music I don’t know or find a new original song gimmick enticing so it was not a selling […]

Are Dinosaurs Dumb? No!

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

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I am, as several other essays emphasize, an advocate of the position that science is not an objective, truth-directed machine, but a quintessentially human activity, affected by passions, hopes, and cultural biases. I read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man a few months ago, and mentioned to my brother that while I enjoyed it, for some reason I thought it was going to be a collection of science essays on a variety of topics. My brother promptly sent me Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb: More […]

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go”

Elvis and Me (1985) by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon

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Content note for book and review: Grooming, addiction, domestic violence So I’ve recently got into writer/comedian/actress Chelsea Devantez‘s podcast Glamorous Trash, which does deep dives into celebrity memoir and generally unpacking celebrity myth making and narratives in a funny, thoughtful, sometimes poignant, and very incisive and sympathetic way. I listened to the episodes about the memoirs I’d read, and then ordered a bunch more that looked interesting to read before listening to their episodes. (Do other people approach podcasts like book series/binge-watching, whereby they listen […]

War. Hunh. What’s It Good For.

The Village of Ben Suc by Jonathan Schell

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Since my high school days, I have been a stanch advocate of magazines.  Fashion, of course, at least back in the day.  (Ah, Seventeen, you were a teen age dream.)  But many others as well.  Fought my way through many a Scientific American.  Roamed the world with National Geographic.  All the generic news magazines, (was definitely Team Time) as well as many of the more partisan sort, although many wussed out as years went by.  But my one tried and true was The New Yorker.  […]

“There are so many ways to tell it, and all of them are important. But each way paints a very different picture and leads down a different road.”

Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton

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Like many of my millennial siblings I partake in quite a bit of true crime content. Over the years it’s become important to me that the content I consume is doing the work of being ethical in how it portrays the victims and their loved ones. I’m not here for tragedy porn, I’m here because the hows and whys of human interaction fascinate me and sometimes those interactions are negative.    Which is perhaps why Lay Them to Rest found its way onto my to […]

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.” —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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We’ve all seen a t-shirt, bumper sticker, mug or mouse pad with seem variation of the motto “Well-behaved women seldom make history”. I actually own a t-shirt, my mother had a bumper sticker on her Jeep Cherokee, and I think somewhere in a box shoved in one of my closets I might have a tote bag. What I didn’t know was that “well-behaved women seldom make history” was originally from a paper about Puritan women’s funeral sermons, or that it was coined by a Mormon […]



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