Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Snarky but Serious Look at Pop Culture

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

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Bingo 7 (The Collection) for the diagonal L to R, top to bottom BINGO! I have had Bad Feminist on my physical TBR shelf for some time. I was motivated to read it for the Bingo square, but also because I’m writing a course syllabus for this fall in which I am considering including a section from Bad Feminist. I figure, if I’m going to teach it, I should know the whole thing for context. I have heard a lot about Roxane Gay as a […]

Can You See Me America?

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin

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I heard about the movie, but had no idea there was a companion book to it.   “In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.” The writing, essays, the photos that […]

She needs to write more. Immediately.

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

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I can’t really say enough about this compelling little book. Brown unpacks white privilege in a way that made me feel convicted and challenged in the ways that I look at the world (through the eyes of a middle-class, white, Canadian woman), but does it with such grace that I wanted more. Not because it was comfortable, because it definitely was not, but because I know deep down that there are cultural biases ingrained in me that I need to address and unlearn. Privilege I […]

Bringing colour and life to a childhood under apartheid

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

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In the world of celebrity memoirs, this book is a gem.  Although Noah gives us bits and pieces of how he got from the ‘hoods of Johannesburg to replacing Jon Stewart on the Daily Show (ie: being the funny guy to avoid being an outcast), his book is really about growing up mixed race under apartheid in South Africa.  The stories are sometimes almost too wild to believe (he was pushed from a moving car to escape a potential murder or assault, the domestic violence described […]

Poetry that is beautiful

Thrall by Natasha Trethewey

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If you like poetry, you should read Natasha Trethewey. These poems are, on one hand, about her relationship to her father, and, on the other hand, the position that black people have been too often placed in by white people. Thrall is an interesting word choice because it means being in someone’s power. There is the power that family holds over us. There is the hold that the art that inspired some of these poems had on Trethewey. There is the sense of ownership that […]

Must read about education

None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Altanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corparate Greed, and Criminalization of Educators by Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton

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Disclaimer: I received a copy via a giveaway on Libirarything. This book about the Atlanta school test cheating scandal is really two books in one body and as such is not as good a book as it could be. Shani Robinson was a teacher at Dunbar Elementary in Atlanta. After she left the school, she was charged as one of the teachers who allegedly changed answers on standardized tests. Robinson plead not guilty, but sadly, lost in court. She is appealing. I hope she wins. […]



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