Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Escaping Slavery Is the Least Interesting Thing About Him

The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson & the Story that Sparked the Civil War by Jared Brock

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My boss ordered a free desk copy of The Road to Dawn for his class, and when it didn’t arrive on time, he bought it himself. As usually happens, the desk copy ended up arriving at the same time as the Amazon book, and he gave me the free copy. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf behind my desk at work for four years and I’ve never cracked the cover. It’s not that it didn’t interest me, but more that I put it away and […]

An interesting read about a white man coming to terms with his slave-owning family history.

Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball

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I’d never heard of this until vel veeter’s review last year, but then immediately put it on my TBR as it sounded really interesting. And it was interesting! For the most part. Large parts were a slog. It also didn’t really do what I wanted it to do, except in the preface, which was written in 2014 and not included in the original publication. Edward Ball descends from the Ball family, wealthy plantation owners and people responsible for enslaving thousands of Black people over two […]

The Public World and the Private Domain

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

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Annette Gordon-Reed uncovers the family history of the Hemingses of Monticello, who are known as the slaves of Thomas Jefferson – though their story encompasses more than that. I knew a bit about Sally Hemings and her relationship with Jefferson, but the author goes beyond this notable person to expand her focus to her entire family. In many ways the Hemingses are remarkable for their blood relationship with Jefferson’s wife Martha and how that affected their treatment, but in others they were just like the thousands […]

A fantastical twist on the slave narrative

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates turns the slave narrative on its head. With his first fiction novel, Coates deftly melds together historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy. The novel follows the life of Hiram who we meet when he nearly drowns in the local river. Hiram is born a slave on a Virginia plantation, the son of the master. A story that’s all too common in history. His father made Hiram help his brother with his studies. Hiram has to hold his tongue and go […]

A monumental achievement that mostly worked like I thought it would

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

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I was shocked to see that this book had only been reviewed one time for Cannonball Read. My cultural frame of reference for this show is that it came out before my time, was one of the biggest shows in the history of television. The show premiered in January of 1977 and Part I garnered a 40.5 share. The show was aired over the course of a single week because CBS was afraid it was going to be a bust, and preferred one bad week […]

In which I finally rectify having never read an American master of writing

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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[TW: violence against children, racial slurs, depictions of slavery, abuse] BINGO – UnCannon In high school I took two AP English classes. In college, I took a Comparative Western Literature course. Toni Morrison was not on any of my reading lists for those courses despite the fact that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and that Beloved was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Perhaps, Morrison is not read more at […]



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