Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Faint of the Heart

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

by 2 Comments

One of the strangest things to those who study the European theater of World War II is why the Nazis didn’t send their militarized concentration camp troops to the front lines in the east. I don’t know enough about history to know if it would have made a difference or not; probably not. But Berlin certainly knew that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be seeking a simple armistice after Operation Barbossa and the atrocities of Stalingrad. One would think that preserving the safety of the Reich […]

The Nazi Handmaid’s Tale

Widowland by C.J. Carey

by Leave a Comment

In a 1953 England under the control of German forces, life is good for Rose Ransom, a member of the privileged Geli class – or at least as good as life can be for a woman in the oppressive regime. But when she is given the task of infiltrating Widowland in search of possible subversives, she comes to learn she might have more power than she always thought. The premise of this book caught my eye immediately. I haven’t really read alternate history books before, […]

A Game of Chicken

City of Thieves by David Benioff

by 3 Comments

Seventeen year old Lev lives alone in Leningrad. It’s 1942 and the siege is in full swing; Lev’s mother has left the city with his younger sister. Lev’s father, a renowned poet, has been dispatched by the NKVD years ago into an unmarked grave, and so Lev lives alone in his apartment building, with people who share his fate but that aren’t his friends. There is little more to do for Lev than read chess manuals and focus on the all-encompassing hunger he feels. One […]

The Road to Hell

Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris by Ian Kershaw

by Leave a Comment

Read this as part of CBR15Bingo: Europe. Adolf Hitler’s entire life story takes place in Europe and he, more than any one person, instigated a world war that began in Europe. Many times, Europe is considered a fancy, civilized place and I think we need to own how historically, western Europe has given the world a horrifying amount of barbarism between colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Holocaust.  While far from an expert on Nazi Germany, I perhaps know more about it than the typical […]

Anti-Semites Get Theirs

Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America by Michael Benson

by 1 Comment

CBR 14 Bingo: Bodies Bodies hit the floor a whole lot of times, if not permanently. With Nazism on the rise in 1930s America, protected by free speech laws, a Jewish judge sets out to deal with them in the only way he knows how – by setting gangsters on them. I’m not big on WW2 stories, mostly because I feel like the market is rather oversaturated. But rather perversely I’m still always on the lookout for unique stories in this setting, because those stories […]

Have you heard of Pervitin?

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

by 2 Comments

One of the weirdest things that’s happened to me as an adult is that I’ve learned how fluid “history” can be. Growing up, my understanding of the concept of history was that smart people figured out what happened, and they told us, and that was it. In college books like Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People’s History of the United States opened up my thinking to the idea that any narrative (historical or otherwise) comes from a point of view and has a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo