Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Landmark Read

Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis

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Last month, when I was looking to try reading Angela Davis’ work, Women, Race, & Class was the primary recommendation. At the time, my local libraries were closed and this one was heavily borrowed via e-reader, so I picked up the available Are Prisons Obsolete? It was very good, giving me a concise history of penitentiaries and made me reconsider prison abolition. But I was still eager to get to this one and got excited when I saw it available. It was worth the wait. Davis does such […]

cbr12bingo – Adaptation!

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

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It is 1954, and a young man named Atticus is headed home to Chicago. In Chicago he will find his beloved uncle and aunt, who together run The Safe Negro Travel Guide and Travel Agency. His uncle, like himself, is a lover of pulp novels and dime store comics. His aunt travels the country alone, adding stops to the travel guide while looking at the stars. He’ll find his little cousin, a comic-book hound and talented artist. He’ll find his old friend Titia, who has […]

Too Much and Too Little

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon tells an unflinching tale of slavery and survival, set in a future that is horrifically similar to both America’s dreadful past and terrible present. They sugarcoat nothing; what else would you expect from a story that starts with a gruesome amputation? I have to applaud Solomon for writing a brutal and gut wrenching story. They shout out the horrors of racism, giving graphic depictions of brutality. Black women are tortured, raped, and publicly executed, and Solomon makes you stare at these scenes of […]

This Is The Way

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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With the requisite qualifications that I’m a cishet white dude reviewing this, please take that into consideration when reading. Call outs are, of course, fair game. Like many Americans, I’ve dug into several books on antiracism in the wake of the uprising following George Floyd’s death. I would recommend them all. They all have knowledge and wisdom for these and all times to both address internal attitudes and reform personal politics around racism. None are quantitatively “better” than the other. But if I had to […]

We have to be better than this

Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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An incredibly well-written account of yet another shameful episode in how white people treat others, Killers of the Flower Moon looks at the systematic murder and robbery of the Osage Indians in 1920’s Oklahoma. Having forced the Osage on to what was thought to be useless, unfertile ground, white Oklahomans were pissed when it turned out that said land turned out to be incredibly oil rich and that the Osage had retained the rights to the fortunes reaped from this in the original agreement to […]

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world It is time to listen. James Baldwin had a voice unlike any other. He transcends country, creed, and time. His work is astonishing and terribly important. The […]



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