Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If You’re Sick of Reading About Our Current Disaster, Try This One.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

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Let’s distract ourselves from current disasters with even worse ones from the past, shall we? There are nor many single-event disasters with greater name recognition or cultural impact than the meltdown at Chernobyl—so much so, that it still shapes the zeitgeist around nuclear power 25 years after the event. Adam Higginbotham does an excellent job at detailing exactly how the world fell apart and the exact human cost. It certainly seemed like the end of the world for the town of Pripyat, which was built […]

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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This was really interesting to read back to back with How to Be an Antiracist; they shed light on each other in weird ways. But they are also two very different books! My main takeaway from Caste is that Isabel Wilkerson is a great writer. I’m set to read her first book next month, and I’m now looking forward to it even more. She employs metaphor and other literary techniques in a way that you don’t normally see from non-fiction writers. It brings a depth […]

A small book about big ideas.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

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I now see why this has been a bestseller. I mean, I loved his first book, so I figured I would like this one, too, but his first book was a straight up history, and this one was much more of a genre mish-mash. I didn’t at all realize going in that a large portion of it would be memoir, and that turned out to be the best part of the book! I finished this book on January 6th. It is ruining my reviews, so […]

Three friends, a revolution, and (for me) a look at our literary biases

Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning

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Last year came and went with the stillness of a thrashing fish out of water — I certainly don’t need to recap what an astoundingly not-normal year 2020 was. We were all just doing our best, gasping for air while picking up new hobbies to distract ourselves from the pandemic, racial injustice, the world ending, etc. And this is where I let you non-Asia readers in on a secret: While the US and Europe played cat-and-mouse with the virus (seriously, does anyone really know what […]

Genghis Khan: A guy from a long time ago who was very important. I know some things about him now!

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

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Ultimately I really enjoyed this audiobook. Audiobooks as a format really help me to absorb nonfiction books, particularly ones that I would normally have trouble taking the time to concentrate on. And this was a pretty fascinating book. I knew next to nothing about Genghis Khan, the Mongols, this period in history, or the cultures of the people who lived in this area. After reading the book I know a little! Firstly, Genghis Khan wasn’t even his name! His name was Temüjin. Genghis and Khan […]

Hubris is the name of the game.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson

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This was just an okay read for me. A narrative non-fiction account of the hurricane in 1900 that was one of the most destructive in American history, Isaac’s Storm is really a feat of research and documentation. It’s clear Larson did his homework. It just never really grabbed me, until it did grab me but in a very unpleasant way. Larson painstakingly accounts the days leading up to the hurricane, mostly focusing on Isaac Cline, who headed up the Galveston, TX branch of the weather […]



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