Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Root of All Evil

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, PhD

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Cbr12bingo Money Mary L. Trump’s book has been called a Trump family “tell all,” but this is less a family history than an analysis of the family dynamics that created Fred Trump’s little monster, Donald. There are some interesting family details there, most of which have already been revealed in the media hype surrounding its release, but Mary L. Trump spends much of her book (which is less than 250 pages and a pretty quick read) trying to explain how Donald became the self aggrandizing […]

On racial, ethnic, and cultural identity development

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D.

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First, I am white. It is important to mention that so that I can also identify all the privilege that I brought with me to reading this book. In the twentieth anniversary edition of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Tatum starts with a 72 page prologue detailing all the ways that race, racial identity development, and race relations have played a part in modern history since the original writing of the book. It is extensively research and meticulously organized. […]

“I often described my sudden shift in self-awareness as feeling as if a demon had entered my room in the middle of the night, startled me awake by whispering, ‘What if you were a man, sort of?’ into my ear, then slithered out the window before I could ask any follow-up questions.”

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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This would honestly be five stars except for a handful of essays/interludes that were too experimental and obscure for me to get anything out of them. I’m going to keep this review short and sweet for a couple of reasons, the first being that the time for me to have said something detailed, thoughtful, and incisive about it would have been back in late April when I first finished it. That time has now long passed. The second reason being that I’m not sure I […]

A science heavy debunking of contemporary gender essentialism.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

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I tried to read this book near the beginning of quarantine, in hard copy, and my poor overloaded brain just couldn’t handle it. If I had read this in audio, a format my brain can handle for serious subjects, I probably would have rated it much higher, and gotten through it much faster (and I’ll be honest, retained more than 10% of it). So take this review with a grain of salt. (P.S. I just googled that phrase, and it evolved from something Pliny the […]

A fuckin’ great book about swearing.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen

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This was a fun, nerdy, sciencey book that takes something taboo and unserious and treats it seriously, which very much appeals to me. This is going to be a short review, because I read the book back in the beginning of April, and my memories of the specifics have mostly faded. I remember that for the most part, I found it HIGHLY enjoyable. Bergen is a linguist and cognitive scientist, so he’s got all the good details. This book is basically everything I wanted from […]

Aged but in an unexpected way

Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

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In an earlier review (for Hamlet on the Holodeck) I mentioned that new media books tend to age rapidly and somehow become irrelevant while being written. Convergence Culture is both a prime example of it but not in the way I expected it to. Convergence culture is the combination of different media and the creation of new forms of expressions and new forms of media. Specifically, it looks at how corporate culture and fan culture interact in the 21st century, and how the internet changed […]



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