Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Whitewashed Histories and Walls

White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port by Kate Storey

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CBR16 Bingo: Cult – The Kennedys have rather a cult following, and in this book particularly we learn how many people were so fascinated they swarmed their homes in Hyannis Port. When the Kennedy family decided to make their summer home in Hyannis Port, MA, they little suspected how strongly associated the place would become with their aspirations and their scandals. I’m a Massachusetts native, but my family’s roots there don’t go back long enough to have really witnessed the heyday of the Kennedys in […]

Someday, He Will Be President

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

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Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series has always been honest about what it is. Ostensibly, this is true about every biography. A book about the life of Amelia Earhart should be just that. Only, every biographer, no matter how well-intentioned, objective, clear-eyed or distant brings with them an angle. Perhaps a person was under appreciated in their time. Maybe they were overrated by the laudations of historical standard. Possibly they had a hidden back story that impacted their life. Caro has been clear that these books […]

Rolling Heads

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

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What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall. That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me. I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer […]

I Tried

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles

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I’m going to try and review this book as dispassionately as possible in the beginning. I’ll save my personal comments for the end. Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times writer who now works for The Free Press on Substack, found herself dismayed in the aftermath of lefty uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s death. She’s a liberal, a woman, a lesbian no less and she suddenly found her words and identity out of step with what she saw as progressive overreach. So she attempted to […]

Dwindle, Peak and Pine

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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Birnam Wood are a collective of idealists. They roam around the New Zealand city in which they are based and grow vegetables on unused plots of lands, occasionally with permission of their owners. People volunteer bits of time and effort, driving around the city looking for mulch or abandoned pieces of plastic tarp to cover the plants, weeding the lots and collecting rainwater. Everything is recycled. Important events are democratically decided during a meeting known as a hui, in deference to the Maori, but ostensibly […]

Dystopian romance and humanity

Heart Attack by Shawn Kittelsen

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Includes triggers. Not for under aged 14 (and even then, know your reader). I’m rating Heart Attack by Shawn Kittelsen, Eric Zawadzki and Mike Spicer a 4 for several reasons: It is a strong take on what is happening today. It is an interesting story about family (biological and found) and how friendships and love shapes us. It talks about how power and greed corrupts both good and not so good people. And we see how things are not perfect, but humanity does try to […]



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