Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Our myths have not served us well.”

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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I don’t imagine this will be a long review, not because the work doesn’t deserve it, and not because there wasn’t plenty to discuss during our book club earlier this fall, but because after spending months with this work, I don’t know how much more brain space I can give it. In a not insignificant way, I need to be done with this work for now. This book is a discussion. Its various contributors are providing context, new or more in-depth analyses of how so […]

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”

Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly

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I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I did. It was just okay. Very informative; kind of dull. I feel like a big jerk saying I liked the movie better, but I liked the movie better. I know this is an unfair comparison because the movie takes just a portion of the information in here and dramatizes it, but it’s the best bit, and the compelling narrative and much easier to follow cast of characters just makes for better story. Yes, […]

“You put dinosaurs and people together, you always get screaming.” (Bingo)

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

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CBR14 Bingo: Time (the whole book is about time travel to different points in Earth’s history) Dr. Madeleine “Max” Maxwell is recruited by the seemingly rather mundane St. Mary’s Institute of History, only to discover that they are actually a secret organisation that time travels to various points in history, for research purposes. Obviously, you can’t just throw anyone into a time machine and have at it, so there’s a lot of training. Then there’s the fact that time travel is rather dangerous, and she […]

Greatest Debilitating Body

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

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Read as part of CBR14 Bingo: elephant. The title has an elephant in the logo mold of the symbol of the Republican Party, which is an elephant. Also, the filibuster is the elephant in the room on why our congressional body is in stasis.  Like other history/political books I read, I often judge them based on how angry they made me on each page. This one is definitely up there. Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has written a quality look on […]

The greatest true-life adventure story ever told, now with more photos

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander, with photos by Frank Hurley

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CBR 14 BINGO: Bodies, because the men on this ship were pushed physically beyond all reasonable limits, and also because one member of the expedition team lost all the toes on one foot. Also, it involves crossing bodies of water. BINGO: Snake, Shadow, Cold, Rec’d, Bodies In 2019, I read Alfred Lansing’s Endurance about Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 Antarctic expedition, and it became one of my favorite books of the year. Shortly after, this book by Caroline Alexander, a companion piece to a 1999 exhibition […]

New York S—Y

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman

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Read this as part of cbr14bingo: time. Maggie Haberman connects Donald Trump’s presidency to his upbringing, rise, fall, and rebirth in New York City. By covering one aspect of time, we learn how the city and the country made the man…and how he would eventually remake the country. An aside: The cover art is from The Washington Post’s review of Haberman’s book. I loved it, though I’m out of free articles and have no idea who to credit with it. Ever since his presidency mercifully ended, I’ve had a […]



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