Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If only we could get back to those eight years

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” (123) I first discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates when a friend of mine recommended The Beautiful Struggle back in 2009. Since then, I’ve kept my eyes out for Coates, whether he’s speaking on The Daily Show, or writing a new book. When I noticed his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), I immediately got on the wait list at the library. As a side note, I was a little […]

Between the World and Me…And Me

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Between the World and Me is a tremendous book, which is why it is surprising that it took me nearly a month to write this review. Part of it is that life happens and it is difficult to keep up with everything. Other times, it is the worry that any review can never do enough justice to the book or the subject. But as I try to write it today, I realize that the book has imprinted certain feelings on me of anger and guilt. […]

Graphic Novel and a Double Cannonball!

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Best for: Fans of graphic novels in the Marvel universe. In a nutshell: I’m not entirely sure what is going on. Line that sticks with me: N/A Why I chose it: We are in the midst of a huge book purge because it costs an absurd amount of money to ship books overseas, and this one from my partner’s pile caught my eye. Review: I think this is a situation where I needed to have more background to fully understand what was going on. I […]

Our American Tragedy

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Reading Between the World and Me was a revelation for me and many others. It brought Ta-Nehisi Coates into the mainstream conversation, and it added a component to the conversation about race and systemic racism in the United States. I was eager to read his new book, We Were Eight Years In Power, because it was a compilation of Atlantic articles during Barack Obama’s tenure as president of the United States. I had also read “The First White President” and was troubled and challenged by […]

No Explanatory Commas (and That’s A Good Thing)

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In this beautifully written memoir, Ta-Nehisi Coates creates poetry on the page about growing up in and around Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther but now a more scholarly activist and “Conscious Man.”  Though present in all his children’s lives, the senior Coates had seven kids by four women and that creates a complicated extended family for Coates.   He describes a childhood that is a mix of pop culture, “woke” politics, and neighborhood tensions and one that has Coates negotiating […]

I wish my younger self could have read this book.

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First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing.  He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power.  If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates.  Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him.  For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]



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