Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not a Meal to Remember

Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg

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Reading this book was a bit like saving up to go to a really nice restaurant only to have the  the food be overpriced and underwhelming. The book uses the relationship between Totenberg and Ginsburg as the hook to get you to buy/read the book. The book is really the autobiography of Nina Totenberg, but her approach is to weave her career and personal life together with Ginsburg’s. The technique doesn’t work. Totenberg is too deferential to Ginsburg to say anything other than Ruth was […]

“Towards the end of my first time in Indonesia I stayed in a house on the edge of the jungle and dreamed the worst nightmares I have known since I was a child.”

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry

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CBR15Bingo: Asia & Oceania (all about Indonesia and experiencing the uprising that unseated Suharto) I picked this up because I loved The People Who Eat Darkness, Parry’s later work about trying to catch a murderer in Japan. It is such a great book that I’ve been wanting to read other work by him, so I was happy to find out that he’d written this part memoir, part on the spot reporting about the time he’d spent in Indonesia as a young journalist. I didn’t know […]

A Disappointing Read for Me

So Compassionate it Hurts: My Life as a Rabbi on the Spectrum by Tzemah Yoreh

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I was really excited to read this because I’d never seen another book that combined looking at Judaism and Autism through a memoir lens. Unfortunately this book was just not for me and I ended up irritated and forcing myself to finish it. It’s a pretty short book and a third of it is sermons and poetry, which for me took away from the actual memoir portion. Yoreh is extremely into poetry and I know this is a personal issue, but I am not a […]

“I started out in a green house with a red door in a small town, where mysteries abounded.”

Born With Teeth by Kate Mulgrew

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Voyager is my favorite Star Trek series so I was interested to read this book and learn more about Kate Mulgrew’s life. She is a very lyrical writer with a great eye for detail — having read other celebrity memoirs before, you can tell when one is ghostwritten and this one read as if it was purely her own effort. She has a strong voice and is able to really capture a scene and the elements that make it powerful. Her writing elevates this beyond […]

“It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin.”

Managing Expectations: a Memoir in Essays by Minnie Driver

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Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been following along with Minnie Driver’s acting career in real time since her debut in Circle of Friends. Several of her performances have stood out to me over the years and as I have a fondness for memoirs, picking hers up seemed inevitable and going the author read audio route all the better. For almost a week Driver’s voice accompanied me on my various drives (and notably in and out of Philly for work in a day) and it was truly […]

An extremely thought provoking read, with an excellent audiobook.

Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri

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Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. This is a book that many, many people right now could benefit from reading and thinking very hard about, and then reflecting extra super hard about their life choices. (I am not excluded from this!) I clicked “Request” on NetGalley for this one on an impulse, and I’m glad I did. The topic seemed interesting and relevant, and that turned out to very much be the case. […]



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