Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What Are We?

Culture: The Story of Us by Martin Puchner

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This was another library impulse grab in my mission to read more non-fiction and I’m glad I made it through! Using key moments and figures, Martin Puchner lays out a brief sketch of human culture over the millennia. Which, you know, huge task! He focuses on times of cultural exchange, whether willing or not, and how we are constantly borrowing, assimilating, and rediscovering who we are. The examples he chooses are diverse and not just the frogmarch of Western Civ that would have us believe […]

A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

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This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]

“There’s no uniformity in the panoply of butts.”

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

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I have to say that given the cover of this book, and the title, I was expecting the book to be more…tongue in cheek? But this book isn’t that. Rather than being a fun “backstory” of our fascination with butts, it’s a pretty straightforward gender and race studies critique of Western pop culture’s fascination with butts. The misdirection is certainly the fault of the publisher, as the author is very clear on the book’s intentions from the Introduction on. With that bit of business behind […]

“You can’t force love, it unfolds.”

Men Loving Men: A Gay Sex Guide and Consciousness Book by Mitch Walker

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I really enjoyed this and it was uplifting to read after the Dahmer book I just got through, where the author was associating gay sex and being gay with corrupting people’s souls. Men Loving Men is partially a straight forward guide to gay sex, but it’s also a “consciousness book,” which in this case meant a lot of cheerful and thoughtful positivity. I had thought it was mainly going to be a sex ed book, as I’d somehow missed the subtitle, so I was pleasantly […]

A fixed point in a changing age.

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This was fun! I think I expected a bit more from it, but overall it was an entertaining, informative look at the phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes. First, what didn’t work for me. Dundas bases this entire book on trying to find out the answers to a central question, why has Sherlock Holmes endured, reviving and reviving over 130 years? Well, the problem here is that there isn’t really an answer to that question! There are 5,000 possible answers. It’s not something anyone will ever *know*. […]

Somebody give Glen Weldon a high-five.

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The best thing about The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon’s book-length ode to Batmania, is Glen Weldon himself. Sure, the actual book is informative and well thought out, organized and insightful. But it’s also got a personality to it, thanks to Weldon, who impregnates even the most mundane sentence with his dry wit and his enthusiasm for his two subjects (Batman, the nature of nerdery). His twin theses? Nerdery isn’t about what you love, but loving what you love with a staggering, vacuum-sucking passion. And that […]



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