Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Blood in the streets

Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury

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Gangs of New York is exactly the sort of book that I’d like to use to beat some sense into the types of people always looking back fondly to the ‘good old days’ (which are always much better when seen through rose-tinted glasses and presume that the person looking back would have been a rich, white man to elevate themselves above all the shit),  a comprehensive look at the many, many stampings, stabbings, robberies, murders, riots and much more perpetrated by the incredible and vast […]

More work to be done

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts was our Mocha Girls Read book club selection in June. It became a very timely selection after the horrible death of George Floyd, which shone a brighter light on Black Lives Matter activism in America. As a Black woman, I was suffering from emotional exhaustion during that time. This history book actually helped put so many current things in perspective. We have come a long way, […]

Putting Black women back into the historical narrative.

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

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This was a really good book for what it was—a survey of Black women’s roles throughout 400 plus years of North American history—but the relatively small 219 page count just wasn’t enough space to really get into the sorts of details I really love when reading about history. I don’t think we can discount the impact of the purpose of the book, though, since its entire aim is to place Black women back into the historical record, and it very much succeeds in that goal. […]

“No, it’s a biography. Like a man would write.”

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe

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This book opens up with a chart listing all the things that the public consciousness “knows” about George Washington, right next to facts debunking those myths. Which is what they are: myths. As one of America’s Founding Fathers, the man who led the country in the Revolutionary War, and the first President of the United States, he has become more a mythologized figure than an actual person for most people. And as Coe points out in her introduction, even the most rigorous historian and scholar […]

To Do And Do Not

A Promised Land by President Barack Obama

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It’s tough to put aside my feelings on President Barack Obama and his politics and just rate this on its merits alone but I’ll try. I feel like I was capable of doing so with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened, though Obama obtains far more space in my imagination, having served as President and having been the most historic one of my lifetime. This isn’t as candid as HRC’s book but it’s candid enough. Obama starts from his childhood years, goes quickly through his early time […]

The Crown ain’t got nothing on this

Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court by Lucy Worsley

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For some years now I’ve been trying to work my way somewhat chronologically through English history, but a new mania for all things Georgian plus Lucy Worsley had me eagerly jumping ahead (I’m coming back for you, Charlie II, don’t worry). Inspired by the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace, commissioned by George I and featuring portraits of the servants of the Royal household, Courtiers is a brilliantly gossipy look at the reigns of Georges I and II and the different figures that peopled their […]



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