Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A First Lady to Remember

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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Michelle Obama’s Becoming was an inspirational memoir to experience. I gave the audiobook to my mom for Christmas, but ended up borrowing and reading it myself! I had very high expectations for this book. It ended up being more of an emotional journey than I imagined. The Former First Lady recounts her childhood and her family. She goes into great detail of all the sacrifices her parents made for her and her brother in Chicago. My parents are both from nearby Indiana and  Chicago is […]

Who Was…. Part two

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Yes, I have mentioned the Who Is/Who Was series before, but I have several of the titles and could not let good reads go to waste! This time: Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.? and Who Was Barack Obama? and Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Charles Darwin are the “newest” ones devoured. Of course, pairing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama is natural. Two men of color who broke racial barriers. But why pair Earhart and Darwin, too? Earhart broke down barriers, too, […]

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 […]

Plenty of explosions, but not as many sweeping camera angles.

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Bravely etched into the opening chapter of this book is the proclamation that the harrowing account of the attack in Benghazi will not include a rundown of the crimes, real or imagined, of the Obama administration. This is not a political book. And thank Christ for that. Don’t get me wrong, I love history, and I see politics as history experienced unclouded by the mists of time. I enjoy reading about political machinations, and try to view the world through various partisan lenses. But there […]

To stare into the abyss and see a vacant soul

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Objective Troy (2015) Not previously reviewed for CBR. On September 30, 2011, the US assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn in Al Jawf, Yemen. Both men were American citizens, though only Awlaki had been targeted by the US government. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year old son, Abdulraman al-Awlaki, was also killed in a drone strike in Yemen, though he wasn’t specifically targeted. He, Awlaki, came to national prominence as a “moderate voice” of Islam following the devastation of 9/11, giving numerous interviews to the media; […]



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