Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

Book of Ages by Jill Lepore

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This history takes up the question asked in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own regarding a hypothetical Shakespeare sister who instead of being a wife and mother (her likely fate) is offered an opportunity to explore her career endeavors or whatever career she might want for herself. Instead of Shakespeare, she posits this question for Benjamin Franklin, who did in fact have a sister, Jane, some 8 years younger than him and who did write one small book, the “Book of Ages” of the […]

The Name of War – Jill Lepore (1998)

The Name of War by Jill Lepore

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I’ve mentioned before that if you’re not from New England (I am not) the amount of New England history you get (at least in other parts of the US) is relatively limited. Here’s a case of where even within New England the history of this war is relatively untold, told from one specific direction, and plenty is misunderstood. Using recent poststructuralist thinking to guide her, Jill Lepore to find ways to narrate the history of this war, while discussing the specific difficulties contained in the […]

This should really be titled The Secret History of Wonder Woman’s Creators.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

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This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was pretty good all the same. I think this three star rating is due to two things: 1) I was expecting more of a history of Wonder Woman the character with some stuff about her creator(s) thrown in as well, and what I got was a history of her creator(s) in full, along with a healthy side order of what was actually going on in history at the time, with an emphasis on the history of feminism, […]

But nationalism did not die.

This America by Jill Lepore

Aug 9 Fog by Kathryn Scanlan

The Apology by Eve Ensler

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This Nation – 4/5 Stars What makes this good and not bad is that it is not an impassioned plea for civility and tolerance and anything like that. I woke up this morning kind of pissed that I had to decided whether or not bad people who promote genocide and violence, who are allowed to cast doubt about the murder of trans people, endanger journalists, and promote violence against people in general, people like me, and people I care about are to be pitied or […]

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

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The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]

Book of Ages by Jill Lepore

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Book of Ages was a 2013 National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Historian Jill Lepore pieces together the life of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane and in doing so not only reveals the life of a fascinating “ordinary” 18th-century woman who happened to be the beloved little sister of a Founding Father, but also demonstrates her own prodigious skills as an historian. Lepore’s work is specifically about Jane but more broadly about history and historians, biography and novels, and determining whose lives are worth […]



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