Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

File this under “things I’d never thought about but found very interesting.”

The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas by Adrian Miller

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The Slow Food North Louisiana book club was having its inaugural meeting, I mean, no time like pandemic-time for a virtual book group, and this was their first pick, in honor of Black History Month. Quick FYI, “Slow Food” is an International Movement, started in the 1960s in Italy, as sort of a direct response to the commercialization and “fast food-ing” of our culture: it is about celebrating food that is good, clean and fair. It isn’t about healthy or health foods, but about knowing […]

History of several kinds

The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty

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I have to admit up front that I did not completely finish The Cooking Gene; I had it from the library and ran out of renewals before I had to return it. This is not a fast read if you want to really get the content and the feeling. I don’t mean that the style is hard to read; on the contrary, it’s written in a pretty conversational way. What made it slower for me was the depth of what was being presented. This came […]

Finally Giving Credit Where It Is Due in the US Cooking Scene

The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin

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CBR Bingo Review #I’ve lost track: UnCannon I was thinking about using N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Element here, but then I figured that was actually somewhat in my wheelhouse as it’s fantasy and queer. Not so much my standard wheelhouse is American History non-fiction. To make it palatable, I found what’s basically history via thing I do like: cookbooks. Scholar and cookbook collector Toni Tipton-Martin is not old (she’s later middle aged, about 60), not white (African American), and not a man. When I was checking […]

Walking 54 miles for freedom

March: Book Three by John Lewis

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March: Book Three is a slower read then John Lewis and Andrew Aydin’s other two graphic novels because the history told is extremely detailed. While it is all important, some things could have been edited down a smidgen. This history is not easy to deal with to begin with, therefore, the younger (even some teen readers) might get lost in what should have been probably a novel and not a graphic novel. But it is a great look at the other side of the text […]

See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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CBR11bingo: Own Voices I struggled for quite some time trying to decide what to read for CBR11 Bingo’s center square. I’m so glad that I finally landed on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, not just because it’s a book I definitely should have read by now, but because it’s moving and beautiful and painful. I expected The Bluest Eye to be powerful; I didn’t expect it to be poetic. This novel tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl growing up in […]

Dancing Among the Stars

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Inspired by the life of Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel in space, Mae Among the Stars is a fictionalized story of her childhood. Focusing on the highlights as well as her mother and fathers support, along with her own determination to dance in the stars, Roda Ahmend and Stasia Burrington created a new gem to read. The afterwards gives more of a broader view of who Jemison was and the time frame of when these things were happening. Beautifully illustrated, they are […]



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