Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When was the last time your clothes made you smile?

Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams by Eric Darnell Pritchard and Shannon Wright

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Two things are happening to let us know that time moves on. First, we are starting to get 2026 calendars in (and already have the August 2025-June 2026 planners) at my work, and second, 2026 reader copies are becoming available so we are ready for next year (and here we’re not even halfway through 2025!). But one of those readers (that I found online) which is due mid-January 2026 was Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams by Eric Darnell Pritchard and […]

Friends since the 1940s

Are You a Friend of Dorothy?: The True Story of an Imaginary Woman and the Real People She Helped by Kyle Lukoff

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Are You a Friend of Dorothy?: The True Story of an Imaginary Woman and the Real People She Helped is by Kyle Lukoff and illustrated by Levi Hastings. I had hoped that it would be something different than the usual LGBTQ book, as I have read several and wanted more things. The fact that Lukoff is using the code phrase, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” made it seem promising. And while they did not disappoint, as an adult reader, I’m still looking for more. […]

“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 […]

Careless? A Charming Understatement

Careless People: A cautionary Take of Power Greed and Lost Idealism? by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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Well, well, well, if it isn’t the worst people in the world. I don’t think I’ve been so infuriated since I read John Carreyrou’s ‘Bad Blood.’ I don’t believe there’s much left to redeem Silicon Valley at this point. Stick it all into the insinkerator and set the whole kitchen on fire for all I care. The funny thing is, I would probably have never heard of Careless People, let alone read it, if it weren’t for the suppression efforts. In a brilliant display of the […]

What Did the President Not Know, and When Did He Forget It?

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

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The reaction to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book about Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election does not seem to be generating the publicity that its authors had probably hoped for. There are some easily understood reasons for that. For one thing, Joe Biden is no longer the President, so whatever damage his declining health and cognitive abilities could have posed to the republic is a thing of the past. There’s also the fact that the current president is generating enough headlines of his […]

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 […]



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