Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The frontier regulars did the job.”

Fort Davis by Robert Wooster

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Last month, my family made our first pilgrimage to West Texas. We stayed at the idyllic Fort Davis State Park, spent some time in Alpine and Marfa, and attended a Star Party at the McDonald Observatory. Quite the weekend! It may not surprise you at all to find out that Fort Davis is named after an actual “Fort Davis.” It was one on a series of forts leading across Texas to help move settlers West. Fort Davis is now a National Historic Site , more […]

File this under “things I’d never thought about but found very interesting.”

The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas by Adrian Miller

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The Slow Food North Louisiana book club was having its inaugural meeting, I mean, no time like pandemic-time for a virtual book group, and this was their first pick, in honor of Black History Month. Quick FYI, “Slow Food” is an International Movement, started in the 1960s in Italy, as sort of a direct response to the commercialization and “fast food-ing” of our culture: it is about celebrating food that is good, clean and fair. It isn’t about healthy or health foods, but about knowing […]

Reflections in a Carnival Mirror

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“This combination of raw suffering in the workers’ tenements and indifference in the mansions of the ruling elite created a fertile breeding ground for a class of social radical who came to see the dynamite stick and the pistol as the only way to break the cycle of servitude.” – Scott Miller

The Kind of Stuff They Don’t Teach You About At Church

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“A Mormon has a right to believe what he will. His thoughts may be as free as the unconfined air, and his conscience should by no means be restrained by legal enactments. But his acts are quite a different thing.” -Raleigh News and Observer, July 20, 1881

They Didn’t Want to Leave, They Definitely Couldn’t Stay

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“I was leaving the South/To fling myself into the unknown…./I was taking a part of the South/To transplant in alien soil,/To see if it could grow differently,/If it could drink of new and cool rains,/Bend in strange winds,/Respond to the warmth of other suns/And, perhaps, to bloom.”  – Richard Wright

A Necessary Slog

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This was not an easy book to get through. Complicated, dense and full of tiny print, I felt my eyes glazing over at least once every chapter. And let’s be clear-I like hard books. I like history. I like nonfiction. I’m used to people coming over to me while I’m reading my book and asking me what college class it’s for (as a side note, WHY ARE YOU INTERRUPTING ME WHILE I’M READING?!). But Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 was really tough to […]



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