Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

More work to be done

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts was our Mocha Girls Read book club selection in June. It became a very timely selection after the horrible death of George Floyd, which shone a brighter light on Black Lives Matter activism in America. As a Black woman, I was suffering from emotional exhaustion during that time. This history book actually helped put so many current things in perspective. We have come a long way, […]

Where it started, how it’s going/Cannonball

Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

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My first review of CBR12 was Of Mice and Men, and I noted in the review that it was one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It feels like that book set the tone for 2020. By mid-March, reading for fun was … difficult. All the worries and fears surrounding COVID encroached on everything I read. Now that we have made it to the end of the year and there is a light at the end of the tunnel — a change […]

“Guts” delivers and important message to younger readers about mind/body connection

Guts by Raina Telgemeier

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Raina Telgemeier returns to the autobiographical in Guts.  I’m late to the party on this book as my 13 and 9 year old have read it multiple times since its release in 2019.  For those familiar with Telgemeier’s autobiographical graphic novels, this is a story in which Raina is younger than in Smile or Sisters.  She’s in fifth grade and has begun having stomach troubles.  It started with a round of stomach flu going through her family and school.  But afterward Raina begins to obsess about the […]

“No, it’s a biography. Like a man would write.”

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe

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This book opens up with a chart listing all the things that the public consciousness “knows” about George Washington, right next to facts debunking those myths. Which is what they are: myths. As one of America’s Founding Fathers, the man who led the country in the Revolutionary War, and the first President of the United States, he has become more a mythologized figure than an actual person for most people. And as Coe points out in her introduction, even the most rigorous historian and scholar […]

…seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.

How to Be an AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi

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I wrote this review months ago. I have re-written it several times and I’m still not completely comfortable with the results. Worrying about saying the wrong thing or that I spent too much time here talking about myself instead of the book had me reluctant to post it, but those aren’t good enough excuses to not post this review. Unless you have been living in a bunker during our period of social distancing, this is not a title that is unfamiliar. In the wake of […]

Not as good as I hoped

To Drink and to Eat, Volume 2 by Guillaume Long

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When I request a book from NetGalley, I have high hopes that I will enjoy it. I have loved graphic novels that are cookbooks or food centric memoirs. I think communicating about food lends itself to illustration. Cartoonist Guillaume Long writes a culinary comic for Le Monde, “To Drink and To Eat.” While I wasn’t familiar with him, he is apparently well loved. Unfortunately, Long got on the wrong foot with me by writing a jokey little story with recipe about Paul Gauguin moving to […]



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