Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

by 1 Comment

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]

Laughing at Race in America

by 1 Comment

I’ve beensitting on this review for a couple of weeks, struggling to know what to write. The book won the Man Booker prize, which often means a challenging read. After reading the book I watched an interview of Beatty to get a sense of what he was like. He was charming, yet deflecting. I read another interview and found that he truly focuses on the craft of writing. He’s not prolific. But the attention to every word is evident in The Sellout. The book begins […]

Race with a Capital R

by 5 Comments

In the last blog post, I mentioned I had a hard time finding a followup to 2 really good books I read last month. After rejecting ever book in my library TBR pile, I started rummaging through the multiple TBR piles around my house. (Tell me I am not alone in that!) In stack #2, I found a copy of a book recommended to me by a student a few years ago for consideration for summer reading. I never got around to reading it because […]

MLK: The Original Shade Thrower

by 11 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I read Frank Bruni’s opinion piece, titled “The Wrong Way to Take On Trump.” Bruni – former political reporter turned restaurant critic turned opinion columnist for the New York Times – decided to school the American public on how we should “go high” when talking, protesting,  and generally reacting to Trump. Except he didn’t really give specifics on what to do, nor did he interview any activists on their advice. Bruni spent the majority of this column telling us how we failed in […]

That time a Sheriff tried to lynch Thurgood Marshall

by 9 Comments

In 1949, a 17-year old white woman didn’t come home one night. The next day, she and her husband said she had been raped by four black men.  Two of the men had helped the couple when they were stranded in their car. Two more were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime-one was being arrested miles away. But that didn’t matter. The accusation of black hands sullying white maidenhood was enough to whip white Southerners in a frenzy. Only three of the accused […]

Same as it ever was

by 2 Comments

4.5 stars. I just can’t keep myself away from mystery books this year. And why would I even want to with fare as good as this? Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season was a really good book and I’m super excited to read her first book because I’ve heard it’s even better. Caren is a middle-aged black woman raising a young daughter on what used to be a Louisiana sugar plantation called Belle Vie. Her family worked the land for decades and Belle Vie is in […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo