Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Journey to the Center of Life

Gen: Perjalanan Menuju Pusat Kehidupan by Siddharta Mukherjee; Damaring Tyas W Palar

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Another (daft) reading challenge! A few years back I took the best part of 8 months to read through an Indonesian translation of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer  (Kanker Biografi Suatu Penyakit.) I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue with the rest of the translations of Mukherjee’s books. But Google Play was nothing but persistent.  So there we have it; it was a little less laborious this time, but I have managed to make my way though the translation […]

Pigments, Paint, and People

What is Color? The Global and Sometimes Gross Story of Pigments, Paint, and the Wondrous World of Art by Steven Weinberg

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I signed up for my core science requirement in my sophomore year of undergrad. I heard from my advisor and my classmates that the color science course was a good one for theatre majors, fun and easy. Then, on the first day of class, the professor thoroughly destroyed both of those rumors. I dropped it immediately, forgot about my science requirement entirely, and ended up fulfilling it with an 8 AM astronomy course the summer AFTER I should have graduated (I got a C on […]

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]

Power and the Written Word

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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I once had a housemate who tried to teach me some simplified Chinese written characters (hanzi). Nothing too complex, just me 我, you 你, coffee 咖啡 and tea 茶, so on and so forth. But even with such an easy lesson, I realized that some connections were harder to make than others. I was able to match the the vocalization to the meaning: Wǒ is I/me. And I would see 我 written on the page and go ahead and think ‘yes, that’s I/me’. But that […]

The Politics of Being a Medical Examiner and Coroner

L.A. Coroner by Anne Soon Choi

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Note: I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. L.A. Coroner is about as much about the politics of criminal investigation as it is a biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, Chief Medical Examiner in LA from 1967 to 1982. That time frame means he was the one in charge of doing the autopsies and some other forensic investigating for the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, victims of the Manson Family, Janis Joplin, and other celebrities. I have little […]

Bodies Are Political, and So Is What We Put on Them

Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

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Fashion may seem to be concerned entirely with pop culture, but the way people choose to dress can make a statement about their politics, and feminists over the 20th century have made ample use of this fact. You’d think it should be obvious, with how “the personal is political,” but it was definitely eye-opening to see how deeply fashion and feminism have been entwined, used by both those for and against it to make their point. Despite the cliches about the ‘ugly, man-hating feminist,’ many […]



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