Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Life Under the Regime

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel

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Wars come and go, but life goes on. And so it went on in the village of Oberstdorf throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise and fall of Nazism an undercurrent all along – except it was one that swelled in a way that even a quiet little village couldn’t ignore. A few years ago I took a class called Experiencing Total War, in which I learned about what it was like for the average person to live through the world wars. It was […]

Yeah It Was That Bad

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

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I mean…what do you say? I’ve spent most of the summer reading Shirer’s legendary tome on and off. When books failed to inspire or when I had a long drive, I’d put it on audio and knock off two or three sections. It was easy because it never lost its focus despite its grotesque subject matter. Trillions of words have been written about Nazi Germany and trillions more are likely to be written. I don’t have anything unique to say there, though I learned a […]

Do You Want to Win the War on Terror, or Not?

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

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When the Cold War ended, a lot of espionage/thriller writers didn’t know what to do with themselves. Tom Clancy, in particular, invented new villains and resurrected old ones for the US to shadowbox with. We were the last remaining superpower and there really wasn’t anything threatening us. And then 9/11 happened. It was like plugging in an electrical socket. Overnight, there emerged a raft of anti-terrorist fiction that both purports to understand Islam (it does not) and/or the Middle East (ditto). It continues today, a […]

Hamburg-er

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

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I had so much fun reading parts of this that I almost feel bad giving it 3-stars. What I liked about it wasn’t necessarily what I was going for when I picked it up. Germany isn’t one of the countries most well known in the States for European crime fiction. Italy, France, the UK are all heavyweights and even Spain and parts of Eastern Europe have made the rounds in recent years. But the Germans are not especially renowned here in this regard. When I […]

A Different Focus for WWII

Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings

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This book is on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List so I read it when it became available. I’ve read a lot of WWII both in my life and in over the last few years. As this is professional reading, I suppose the kind way to phrase it is that I am over-saturated with WWII at the moment. I was a history major in college, I’m in the military, and my father was described by John Mulaney this week on SNL – he is […]

“Richard knows he’s one of very few people in this world who are in a position to take their pick of realities.”

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)

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Time does something to a person, because a human being isn’t a machine that can be switched on and off. The time during which a person doesn’t know how his life can become a life fills a person condemned to idleness from his head down to his toes. Go, Went, Gone is a carefully crafted, meticulously researched novel that feels as natural as walking down the street. Protagonist Richard is a newly retired professor of Classics and a childless widower. As a former East Berliner […]



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