Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Oh, you mean the GANGS of New York

Rogues' Gallery by John Oller

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I was jonesing for a New York City gangster tale last week. I finally started Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York but quit when I realize that the book is less glorious embellishment and more fan fiction. Frustrated, I looked for a substitute and then remembered I purchased John Oller’s Rogues’ Gallery on a lark. It aspires to be a corrective to Asbury’s highly fictionalized accounting which was held as a historical standard for years. Oller is more scholarly than smooth but this might scratch the itch if you’re […]

Smokey the Bear was Wrong

The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

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The Great Fire of 1910 burned 3 million acres in Western Montana, Northern Idaho, parts of Washington and British Columbia. The fire burned in  newly created national forests including the Bitterrroot, Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai and Lolo. Timothy Egan tells the story of the fire and the larger story of the creation of public lands through the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt, forester Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. The politics of resource conservation and the role of fire are certainly relevant now, particularly with the additional complexities […]

Don’t Go West

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James D. Bradley

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Like a lot of Americans, I learned the broad strokes about the Pacific theater in World War II. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Attacked us! Obviously, we couldn’t just stand pat. So we warred with them from island-to-island until we had no choice but to drop the atomic bomb and end the war. They were the aggressor and it was all their fault. I’m reluctant to call this narrative propaganda. Japan did attack us. But the history of the war in the Pacific […]

The Candice Millard Collection

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard

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I think it was the Reader Harder 2018 Challenge that called for reading a book by a female historian. It may also have been a twitter discussion about female historians but in either event I realized that of all the historical books I’ve read, very few have been written by women.  I wanted to remedy that.  Last year, or earlier this year as they run together, I read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.  Then someone here, maybe Jen K., recommended Paris 1919 by […]



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