Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Remember, never take no cut-offs and hurry along as fast as you can”

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party by Daniel James Brown

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The Indifferent Stars Above is the gripping tale of the Donner Party who in 1846 set off from their homes in the east of the United States of America to travel overland to California, only to discover that the ‘shortcut’ they’d been promised was no such thing, leaving them to flounder in a hostile landscape as winter set in. As the months passed and with no thaw in sight, a small number of the party would attempt to reach civilisation and get help, leaving the […]

When History Repeats itself

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei

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#crb11bingo #TrueStory I am going to write WOW 200 times and OMG for the other 50 words. I am also going to say this the second draft of my review. I found myself just going on about all the little, amazing details to the story. I was near 500 words and could have written another 500. They Called Us Enemy is George Takei’s story in a graphic novel format. Along with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and Harmony Becker the reader sees the years from early/mid-1940s […]

The Bad Kind of Glow in the Dark

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

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I’ve noticed a bit of an interesting trend for me: I’ve started getting a little more into non-fiction. Since I work with a good bit of that kind of thing professionally, I haven’t really done much for spare time reading. And yet here I am with what could be my third(ish) non-fiction review of the year. Unlike my luck with best-selling fiction (generally poor), I seem to have done better of late with the best-selling non-fiction. The Radium Girls is non-fiction, and the best kind, […]

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsberg – Marvelous and Glorious

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik

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For Christmas, my husband got me dissent collar stud earrings as a stocking stuffer. I was delighted, but a little chagrined. I didn’t think I knew enough about Ruth Bader Ginsberg to call me one of her fans, and make me legitimate enough to rock the earrings. But rock them I did, because they make me feel powerful, and they are also adorable – the perfect accessories. But, I wanted to fill a bit of my RBG knowledge gap, so I jumped in the queue […]

Cheating shmeating! In the mid-19th century, Harvard really knew how to rock a scandal.

Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins

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Ooh, I do love a good period true crime drama. From Erik Larson’s much-lauded Devil in the White City, to Kate Summerscale’s lesser-known The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, to Bruce Chadwick’s I Am Murdered (which I reviewed all the way back for CBR5),  you take a  murder that’s at least a century old, add some period costumes, a few blue collar witnesses pitted against high-brow lawyers, and a lot of research, mix well, and you have a perfect cocktail of historical entertainment. I especially enjoy reading […]

Male, Pale, and Yale

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

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Or Harvard. Or West Point. Texas State. But the point remains: this book is about how liberal elites got us into an imperial war. I don’t know how you write a history text better than this. It has exactly what I look for in its subject’s great works: to be good, thorough, and damning. By the end of reading this, I was relieved to be done but thoroughly exhausted at the week-long endeavor, which I was only able to finish in seven days thanks to […]



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