Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What have we learned in the past 80 years? (from publisher description)

Barbed Wire Between Us by Mia Wenjen

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Barbed Wire Between Us by Mia Wenjen and illustrated by Violeta Encarnación was a WOW book. It was not necessarily the story itself (though that is pretty wild) it was the way it was formatted that really made it work for me. It is a fantastic circular story that shows how history can repeat. But not only that, the text is repeated. We start with a young girl who is behind a fence in the 1940s. How she gets there, the thoughts and feelings she […]

Dispatches from the Frontier

Little Pasture on the Prairie by Eliza Blue

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CBR17 Bingo: Work – In this book, the author discusses her life and work on her family ranch, where she is a shepherdess, and all the highs and lows of that lifestyle. Author, songwriter, and shepherdess Eliza Blue invites us into her life on her family ranch in South Dakota as told in the highlights from a decade of newspaper columns. I’ve always lived in places that are hilly or places that are green or places that are both hilly and green. I think if […]

“The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial… but the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane.”

Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile

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CBR17 Bingo: Borrow – Support your local library! Like many of my reads, I borrowed this book from my local public library. The story of cult leader Amy Carlson and Love Has Won burst onto the news due to the unusual circumstances surrounding her dead, but she and her group are just the latest incarnation of New Age new religious movements in the United States. I have a bit of a fascination with new religious movements (which are not always cults, though all cults are […]

“I was fifteen when I decided to go to America and make a name for myself,” Allen Say

The Inker's Shadow by Allen Say

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When I learned that Drawing from Memory by Allen Say had a sequel called The Inker’s Shadow I went into “Find This Book” Mode. And interlibrary loan did not let me down. Now, this book is a lot like the first, but deals with his years in the states. It moves a bit faster, covers more ground and years and fills in the information that shows how he was shaped into the author and illustrator that he would become. It is not just a great […]

The Past Is a Different Country

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris

American Monsters by Adam Jortner

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CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind. The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin. This book is […]

Required guts, courage, and bravery… So of course she was a woman!

Lighthouse Ladies: Shining a Spotlight on Hardy Heroines by Kris Coronado

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When you see a title like Lighthouse Ladies: Shining a Spotlight on Hardy Heroines you might wonder if there really were enough people to fill a book. Well, it sounds like you could fill a book on any one of the four women who Kris Coronado highlights. Instead they take four real life women who saved lives, tended to the light houses, and dealt with other issues and situations. We follow Ida Lewis, Juliet Nichols, Venus Parker, and Julia Toomey who were women who were […]



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