Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Her Bloody Heart Tumbled Into My Lap

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

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Some books are so unremittingly personal that I am driven to distraction. This collection of achingly intimate essays—not quite chronological, in broken narrative, shifting between past and present tense—are addressed to “you” (me?!), which unnerved my inner WASP. TMI, dear author! Put a tourniquet on this open vein, you’re going to die and stain the carpet. Things are intense from page FOUR: The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I […]

“Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.”

Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

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A disclaimer of sorts: I have watched at least the first several seasons of every Shonda Rhimes show, but I have given up on all of them. They stress me the hell out. The drama always feels fresh at first, and then it’s like all the shows start to cannibalize themselves, more and more people die, no one ever stays together for good, etc. There’s no stability. That’s a primetime soap for you, and why I don’t watch them anymore, but I’ve always admired her […]

WTF Indeed

The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker

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A couple of years ago, a movie came and went starring Tina Fey called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the military call letters for WTF. I didn’t even remember the movie until I went looking for reviews for The Taliban Shuffle after I’d read it. I sometimes like to read reviews after I’ve finished a book, just to see if my thinking is in line with the critics’. One thing I discovered while doing so this time, apart from the fact that the book was made in […]

In Rural Idaho, No One Can Hear You Scream

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

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In the category Genres I Like to Read, memoir and horror tie for dead last. (Elizabeth Gilbert is a shameless exhibitionist. Fight me.) However, when a book makes all the “Best of the Year” lists, I feel obligated to give it the old Amazon 1-Click. In the mountains of Idaho, Tara is the last child of a devout Mormon couple—so devout that their youngest children have no birth certificates, have never been to school, and do not go to the doctor, not even for grievous […]

Everybody effing read this.

Educated by Tara Westover

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“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose […]

“Conflicted” would have been a more accurate title

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Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]



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