Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

In Pursuit of Love: A Journey in the Footsteps of Obsession by Mark Bostridge

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CBR17 Bingo: I – Re: the title. Victor Hugo was the most famous writer in the world when his daughter, Adèle, left their home in Guernsey on a years-long mad pursuit of a former lover. Centuries later, author Mark Bostridge retraces her steps and tries to understand her obsession in the prism of his own life. I have not seen acclaimed 1975 film The Story of Adele H., so this was my first real acquaintance with the strange life of Adèle Hugo, whose story was […]

The Past Is a Different Country

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris

American Monsters by Adam Jortner

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CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind. The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin. This book is […]

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]

A Woman’s Work etc.

A Woman’s Place: The Inventors, Rumrunners, Lawbreakers, Scientists & Single Moms who Changed the World with Food by Deepi Ahluwalia, Stef Ferrari, Jessica Olah

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Bingo 8: Work A Woman’s Place: The Inventors, Rumrunners, Lawbreakers, Scientists & Single Moms who Changed the World with Food is basically a short illustrated encyclopedia of women who influenced the food world. The overall thesis is that their intellectual, physical, and cultural work across centuries and places has gone under-acknowledged. These women in different ways had to work to take care of themselves, their families, and communities, and in the process came up with things ranging from Camembert cheese to dishwashers to famous cookbooks […]

(Chappell voice) Battle For Manhattan

Battle For Manhattan by Bruce Bliven, Jr.

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Read as part of CBR 17 Bingo: starts with letter B. Look this is going to be a very strained review. I’m sorry but this book doesn’t merit 250 words. As it says on the inside flap, large portions of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a glorified wikipedia entry. I picked it up because I needed to read a book about the American Revolution for my library book bingo and it was a slim volume. I knew Manhattan had some importance in the […]

North Brooklyn

Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past by Gregory Cobb

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: book begins with the letter “G” I worked in Greenpoint for two years and really came to love the area. My grandmother was from east Baltimore, the same east Baltimore featured in John Waters’ Hairspray. Patterson Park, Canton, Dundalk. Those were her stomping grounds. Those neighborhoods featured a glorious mix of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures coming together in a dense rowhouse-packed area. She always spoke fondly of growing up there. Greenpoint gave me a similar feeling, though like most of […]



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