Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Never Forget

Maus A Survivor’s Tale Vol. I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

Maus A Survivor’s Tale Vol II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman

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Cbr15bingo history Maus is a highly acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning (1992) 2-volume graphic novel that made the news last year as the subject of a book banning in Tennessee (for bad words and a naked female mouse. Really.) Maus is about the Holocaust. Writer/illustrator Art Spiegelman interviewed his own father about what happened to him and their family in Poland during WWII. The Spiegelman family, like so many other Jewish families, was practically wiped out due to Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. In writing about this, […]

“After all, the Statue of Liberty is an immigrant, too.”

Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, Shawn Harris

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Cbr5bingo Picture this I saw a blurb about this children’s book on July 4 and thought it sounded interesting, and it absolutely is. This is a story about the making and gifting of the Statue of Liberty. While it contains fascinating facts on every page, it is the attention to one detail — the statue’s right foot — that provides a powerful and moving message to the reader.  Her Right Foot is aimed at readers aged 5-9 and contains truly delightful art. It reminded me […]

Medieval Over Time in Pictures Has No Substance

The Fantasy of the Middle Ages by Larisa Grollemond, Bryan C Keene

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I realize that The Fantasy of the Middle Ages was basically designed as an accompaniment to an exhibit at the Getty Museum and as such was possibly never meant to be a fully standalone book. Except that it now is, and as a stand-alone book, this is beyond shallow. It has a lot of pretty pictures, but often with little context of the history or art of the source manuscript) , and it brings up aa lot of things about how the Middel Ages in […]

Love and A** Tulips

Flowers and Their Meanings by Karen Azoulay

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Most people probably have some general awareness of the language of flowers even if they’ve never heard the term; at minimum I’d wager most anyone you ask would know that a rose usually symbolizes love, and if you were lucky you might even get someone whose knows some of the color distinctions (white = innocence or purity, yellow for jealousy, etc). Flowers and Their Meanings goes beyond that; in addition to reviewing the origins and general history of the use of flower symbolism in England, […]

History and its Bastards. Greedy, Greedy Bastards.

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. by Adam Hochschild

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

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I think I am going to spend my Memorial Day weekend writing about history. And it’s not going to be about the nice bits of history, either. I have been holding off on a number of these reviews because sometimes the subject matter was just a little too depressing. At best, we are dealing with a conga line of arseholes. At best. And at worst? Well, we’re dealing with some pretty bad ‘at worsts’ here…  The first book is Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A […]

‘To their dismay, he replied that he may as well do a course on Roman dogs.’

A Rome of One's Own by Emma Southon

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Conventional Ancient Roman histories may be dominated by men, but that tells an incomplete story. Emma Southon tells the stories of twenty-one women who made their mark on the empire. While I enjoy reading about history, ancient history is usually not my jam – with one major exception. I will read anything Emma Southon writes, and wish fervently every time I finish one of her books that I hadn’t already read all of her older ones. It’s the conversational tone, the clear pleasure with which […]



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