Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Putting ideas about the past to the test

Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean

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CBR 17 BINGO: TBR, because whenever Sam Kean comes out with a new book, I add it to my TBR BINGO: Play, Purple, TBR, Diaspora, Culture In the introduction to Dinner with King Tut, Kean confesses that he always found archaeology to be a bit dry. It should be thrilling, discovering the secrets of past civilizations, but he usually finds archaeological sites to be a letdown, with “scores of sunburned men and women sprawled in the dirt, dusting off broken pot shards with toothbrushes.” But […]

From Mummies to Tattoos to Eunuchs

Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations by Sam Kean

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Sam Kean also loved the idea of archeology, but never the actually practice; all that digging for a couple of pot shards was not his idea of a good time. Then he discovered experimental archeology: people attempting to recreate the foods, clothing, weapons, architecture, and medicine of ancient civilizations. This book is the record of his foray into the field, organized chronologically from 75,000 years ago in Africa with a spear hunter to the 1500s in Mexico with an enemy of the Aztecs assisting the […]

Another Book for Work – Archaeology Edition

Using and Curating Archaeological Collections by S. Terry Childs and Mark S. Warner

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When I have a work question, I often try to find a book for it. At work I was added to a project team for a landscape preservation project which includes some preliminary archaeological field work. My role was to provide additional historical background information for the archeologists and then provide guidance for how we wanted any finds curated for preservation. I felt ready for most of that work, but as we do not have anyone on staff with a background in archaeology, and our […]

Underwater archaeology

 Shipwrecked!: Diving for Hidden Time Capsules on the Ocean Floor by Martin W. Sandler

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Relation”ship” cbr15bingo  Because SHIPwrecks!  I officially did not finish the book, Shipwrecked!: Diving for Hidden Time Capsules on the Ocean Floor. But I did get about halfway through before I realized I really could not  finish. There is a lot of technical science and that is not my thing. It can be text heavy, and I needed a more uninterrupted setting to read.  However, what I did read was really very good. Things are heavy on the facts, the information and the technology. If you have […]

cbr12bingo – Red!

Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

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Every entry into Rivers of London starts with a splash; we are always diving head-first, sometimes literally, into rivers of blood. Every delightful cover, all done by Patrick Knowles, is a map with a big, red, bloody “X” marking the spot. Every cover is a map, every map is filled with teensy tiny detail, and every seemingly unrelated sketch or nursery rhyme lyric builds together into the marvelous mess that is London. I love his minute details; I feel like I’m looking at a Where’s Waldo illustration for […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]



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