Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That’s why it loves perfectionists–it’s so easy to keep us quiet.”

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown

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Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, has spent two decades studying shame, vulnerability, and courage. This doesn’t necessarily make her a lot of fun at parties. In fact, she jokes that when she tells people she studies shame, they look away uncomfortably and find someone else to talk to. Yet she also has five best-selling books to her name, and her  TED Talk on vulnerability is one of the top 25 most popular TED talks of all time. I hesitate to […]

Delightfully useful for learners and educators.

How We Learn by Benedict Carey

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Well, I just loved this book. The title and subtitle pretty much tell you what it’s about, but I do want to take a minute to impress upon you guys the one thing I didn’t realize until I read it: this book is for practically everyone. As a homeschool mom, I thought this might be a dry but useful book that would help me grow as an educator, but oh no. Are you a student of anything? Any age, any topic? Are you educating anyone […]

A Thought-Provoking Read for Members of the Adoption Triad

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Newton Verrier

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As the title of this book about adoptees indicates, author Nancy Newton Verrier views adoption as a process that wounds adoptees on a fundamental level. Her central theory based on research and personal experience is that severing the connection between a mother and child leaves a wound which profoundly impacts sense of self, including self-worth and self-esteem. She has a strong message for adoptees: What adoptees need to know is that their experience was real. Adoption isn’t a concept to be learned, a theory to […]

Maybe we don’t think so good

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

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This book, by the author of Moneyball, is essentially a biography of the two men who did more to change the way we think about thinking.  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are Israeli psychologists who discovered heuristics and connected the fields psychology and economics, helping create the new field of behavioral economics.  If you recognize either name, it is probably Daniel Kahneman who wrote the outstanding book Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years ago.  At the beginning of that book he writes about his […]

Together We’ll Fight the Long Defeat

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My friends often roll their eyes when I hesitate to embrace anything that’s popular. It’s true that I’m wary of popular things. It’s not because I’m a hipster (I’m not – I live in the suburbs and I like Bud Light and Taco Bell). I think the reason I balk at popular things is because I’m afraid of getting swept up in something that I’ll later regret. It’s better to test things on their own merit than to sign my name to something that sours. […]

I underlined so many things in this book. In pen. Pink pen.

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So I feel a lot of ways about this book, which is basically the opposite of the premise of the book, but what are you going to do? To begin with, I think the authors’ stated premise of the book is both valiant and worthwhile: “to turn your bullshit wish into a goal that can actually be achieved.” That sounds good, right?  Sounds… so much better than endlessly trying to figure out why a thing is happening, or how you can prevent bad things from […]



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