Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Why, yes, I did Double Cannonball on a large book with tiny print that’s won lots of awards, why do you ask?

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

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This book goes wide (not deep) on a very important topic, and should be required reading for everyone. That phrase gets thrown around a lot when talking about “important books”, but I’m seriously for serious here. Kendi has written THE comprehensive book about the history of racism in America, tracing it all the way from its roots in the 16th century through modern day, and he covers it from top to bottom, hitting on every major point you can probably think of along the way. It’s […]

The Banality of Racism

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

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Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and winner of many other literary prizes. It is a series of reflections written as poetry on racism in its many forms, from childhood through adulthood, from everyday personal experiences to those that make national news. Rankine, with precise and evocative language, provides a series of images with words that demonstrate the relentlessness and predictability of racism in America […]

Time For A Different Kind of White Rage

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson, Ph. D.

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Best for: All white people in the U.S. right now. In a nutshell: Dr. Anderson shares a concise history of all the shit black people have gone through because of the anger white people feel when black people start to make even a little bit of progress. Line that sticks with me: All of them. Seriously, I underlined, circled, or commented on all but maybe three pages in this book. Okay, fine, here’s one: “Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the […]

Racism Isn’t Unique to the U.S.

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Best for: People interested in great writing on race, especially writing that gives perspective on race that isn’t US-centric. In a nutshell: Ms. Eddo-Lodge explores the history of racism in Britain and looks at ways to address it today. Line that sticks with me: “Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don’t really have anything material to oppose, faux ‘free speech’ defenders spend all their spare time railing against ‘offense culture.’” (p133) Why I chose it: I follow Ms. Eddo-Lodge […]

A debut that deserves all the praise it’s been given.

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I have been trying to figure out what I want to say about this book for literally months now, and I just can’t do it. I give up. The amount of things I want to say are all swirling around in my brain and getting mixed up with each other, and everything is coming out all garbled whenever I try, so I give up and am now officially half-assing this review in a stream of consciousness manner with no regards for structure, and I am no longer […]

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]



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