Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Wayne Gretzky takes Pierre Trudeau into the boards”

The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy (2018) by Paul Myers

by Leave a Comment

So I watch a celebrity game show type thing in the UK called Taskmaster, and this season a Canadian comedian called Mae Martin is one of the contestants. I became instantly mildly fixated with them, and watched everything they’d ever done, including a sharp and dark and funny drama on Netflix called Feel Good (2020-21), their stand up set, and a sort of comedian game of chicken called Last One Laughing (Canada) on Prime, which also starred Dave Foley, who I knew from NewsRadio (1995-1999) […]

An extremely thought provoking read, with an excellent audiobook.

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

by Leave a Comment

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. […]

A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

by Leave a Comment

This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]

He had taken in the country, and in his eyes and his mind it had been changed, marked by his own individuality, and made part of him.

Out of Africa by Isak Denison

by Leave a Comment

CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #1: Books from different countries. In between a lot of privileged nonsense, it is a love letter to Africa.)After reading Paula McClain’s Circling The Sun last year, I was not finished with the characters. So, I picked up this book to learn a little more about the real-life folks that inspired that historical fiction. This is a classic that I had never read, made into a famous movie, that I have never seen. Well trod territory here, but I’ll give it a go. A Danish […]

Gripping story of resilience

Hostage by Guy Delisle

by 1 Comment

CBR15Passport books from different countries Hostage is the true story of Christophe Andre, a Frenchman working for Doctors Without Borders in Chechnya who was kidnapped and held for three months. Guy Delisle, a French illustrator and writer, interviewed Andre after his ordeal and turned the taped interviews into a gripping work of graphic biography.  In order to place things in context I had to read up a bit on the Chechen/Russian war of 1994-96. The events in this story take place after that conflict had […]

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander

by Leave a Comment

Do you ever read a book’s marketing summary after finishing a book and wonder what in the world they’re going on about? The teaser for “Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World” by William Alexander starts off like this: “The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Stored in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, appropriated as wartime propaganda, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato is the Rodney Dangerfield of foods. Yet, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo