Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Golden Girls with Feet of Clay

The It Girls by Caroline Young

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Nowadays, when one thinks of someone who’s “famous for being famous,” one thinks of the Kardashians or Instagram influencers. But the phenomenon of the It girl is a long and storied one. I read this at about the same time as I read Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century, and they work pretty well as companions – that book describing trendsetting fashion, and this book describing the trendsetters themselves. Young tells the story of It girls through the centuries, who hold such diverse […]

Skirts Just Look So Good on Us!

Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

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Fashion can say a lot about the people that wear it and the places they occupy in time and space. As such, women starting to wear pants is a shorthand for progress in feminism – but, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell argues, the evolution of skirts over the twentieth century too has plenty to say. Like the author, I wear a lot of dresses and skirts, mostly because they are an easy way to look like you’ve made an effort, and also let you slouch and lounge around […]

Hubris and the British Empire, a Match Made in Heaven

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin

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Erebus tells the story of the eponymous ship, part of the British Imperial navy at the height of its power. Though it was originally meant for combat, it was used for exploration – polar exploration, to be precise. It was first sailed to the south pole by James Clark Ross, with its sister ship HMS Terror, for a very successful exploration: geographical landmarks still bear their names (Mount Terror and Mount Erebus). However, the ships’ glory came to an abrupt halt several years later in […]

“A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: “I have been thrown into a far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.”

The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence by Anita Anand

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A Indian freedom fighter waited more than two decades to exact revenge for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre which was ordered by the British Raj – but the story is more complicated and less cinematic than it has been often depicted since. At the start of this book, the author notes that as the descendent of Indians, she had to set aside her natural aversion to the British Raj and admiration for Udham Singh to tell the story in as unbiased a way as she could. […]

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 […]

There’s Nothing More Ill-Mannered than Loving Your Own Wife

Sex and Scandals in Georgian England by John Rankin

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In the Georgian era, where infidelity was widespread –  even expected – among the aristocracy, scandals still resulted, but not necessarily for the reasons one would expect. With the new resurgence of interest in Regency romances, I’ve been struck pretty often how wide of the historical mark some stories can be. The costumes of season three of Bridgerton also makes me wince (I still love Queen Charlotte’s ridiculous wigs though!). But reading Sex & Scandals in Georgian England reminded me that, while it’s one thing to know […]



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