Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You look better than me, and I’m a real woman!” “Who’s that beached whale on the floor?” “You’re so well spoken!”

Why Are You So Sensitive?: Navigating Everyday, Unintended Microaggressions by Billie Lee and Gina Torino

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cbr16bingo Disco Disco is a very loose connection but one I can make fit. You see, the category mentions gay Americans and the 1960s and 1970s. And the one thing I have learned in my reading the last few years, shows that first, this is not “ancient history” but less than 50 years ago in some areas. And the fact that we might think we’ve come a long way with equality and “political correctness” we still have a long way to go. As this book […]

She wrote the words to the stories

What I Must Tell the World : How: Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice by Jay Leslie

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Not only was Lorraine Hansberry a pioneer for many groups (women, playwrights, writers,  women of color, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community) she was a pioneer for reality. She told it as it was and that is amazingly told in this picture book, What I Must Tell the World : How: Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice. Jay Leslie tells the story of Hansberry from a young girl who would see first hand the prejudices of her time, but also would see the courage, the […]

Activist and leader

Little People, Big Dreams: Vanessa Nakate by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara

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As I said with my Lenny Henry review, I recently refound the Little People, Big Dreams series, with their new people or new to most children biography series. When I found Vanessa Nakate I said, “That name sounds familiar, who is she again?” Then I realized she was that Vanessa Nakate, the young woman who had her image cropped out of the photograph that included other climate change activists. This young woman knew that she was not just being cropped out of a photograph, but […]

How to Make A Difference

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next) by Dean Spade

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Best for: Anyone who is interested in building community and addressing challenges while working outside the traditional methods. In a nutshell: Author Spade discusses the concept of mutual aid and how it differs from the concepts of non-profit and charity work, and offers tips for successful solidarity work. Worth quoting: (There is a lot, but the below paragraph I think helped me to shift what changing the world means to me.) “Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the context of professionalized nonprofit […]

Standing up for the community

Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?)  by Mary Fairhurst Breen 

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Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?) by Mary Fairhurst Breen is a clever nonfiction book about everyday people who have made a name for themselves by just being themselves. We might not know them by that name (some people “only” fought the inclusion of a Chick-fil a on their college campus that resulted in Senator Graham making a fool of himself) but they made sure that others can have the freedom of being themselves, being represented, and finding ways to make it […]

An emotional YA in verse

Forever is Now by Mariama J. Lockington

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This book is such an emotional ride and I found it near-impossible to put down. Sadie has been coping with her generalized anxiety for years, but after she watches cops unjustly attack a young Black woman, she is suddenly finding it impossible to walk down the front stairs because “what if what if what if.” As she works on coping and healing and adding new tools to her tool box, Sadie is also trying to use her platform and her voice to bring more attention […]



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