Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

a book for everyone, and everyone should read a book

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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There is no one who isn’t the audience for this book. If you’re interested in science, there’s a lot of it in here. If you don’t know much science, you can skip some of the more technical elements of the book and just get the high level takeaways. If you’re scientifically inclined, you can luxuriate in all the math that Munroe casually throws into his answers. We’d all be better off if we took scientific advice when trying to solve our day to day problems, […]

Does a mama shark tell her kiddo to wait 30 minutes before swimming?

Mother of Sharks by Melissa Cristina Marquez

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I was lucky and recently had Mother of Sharks by Melissa Cristina Marquez fall into my lap (well, in my hands). Not due until late May/early June 2023, Marquez’s story is one we all need to know as it is not just about a woman, or a woman of color, or about science, or the ocean. It is all of that and a fun book to boot. Taking fiction and fact, she tells her story through the eyes of a young girl. We do not […]

See about the sea

The Ocean Is Kind of a Big Deal by Nick Suluk

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The Ocean Is Kind of a Big Deal is Nick Suluk’s latest creation. You might now them better as the Lars the Awkward Yeti author and illustrator, or the books The Brain Is Kind of a Big Deal and The Sun Is Kind of a Big Deal. The humor we know in Awkward Yeti is there, but the clever way of learning is added. The book is cartoon illustrations and for the higher preschool to first or second grader (the second grader might be a […]

After writing this, I learned we are still making breakthroughs in this field! 

Fever: How Tu Youyou Adapted Traditional Chinese Medicine to Find a Cure for Malaria by Darcy Pattinson

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Have you heard of Tu Youyou? She is a Chinese scientist who used traditional Chinese medicine to help cure malaria. And she was not from the 1800s or even early 20th century when we think of malaria research happening, but she was working during the late 1960s and 1970s in a People’s Republic of China task force. Therefore, relatively “new” in the grand picture. And not only did she and other scientists figure out the right ingredients, amounts, heat, and such, she was one of […]

Behold the communication device of the future!

How It Works: The Telephone by Ladybird Books

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CBR14 BINGO: Series, because this book is part of the Ladybird “How it Works” series published in the 1970s. I never pass a Little Free Library without checking out what’s on offer, and one day a few weeks ago I struck gold. Never has one person’s trash become such a treasure. Thanks to Ladybird Books, I was about to learn about how telephones work, or at least how they worked in 1972. This book begins with some history of the telephone and why we need […]

A series of existential crises packed into one easy-to-read tome! #CBRBINGO – Star

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

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Even though Stephen Hawking did an impeccable and brilliant job dumbing down all this physics and quantum mechanics and SCIENCE, I am still not science-smart enough to fully understand most of it. Good try, though, and it was so readable! And it gave me several existential crises. Like, okay, if you are just jonesing for a panic attack, pick up this book and when he starts in on the origin of the universe, just let your mind go there, see if you can encompass the […]



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