Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“One of Harold Nicolson’s many endearing traits was to invent occasions brought about by some preposterous and improbable action on his part.”

Harold Nicolson: A Biography (Volume I: 1886-1929) by James Lees-Milne

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One of my continued passions is Edwardian era history and as I keep reading more books about it, some people pop up over and over again until finally I either buy a biography or their letters and diaries to figure out what they were up to. Harold Nicolson is one of those people who show up in every book you will read about the 1900s through to the 1960s, as he was involved in huge amounts of historical events and had a very busy social […]

“Photojournalists were swept along by the firestorms of change:” A Look at 1989 by the NPPA

The Best of Photojournalism Vol.15 by presented by The National Press Photographers Association and The University of Missouri School of Journalism

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I love photojournalism a lot and so have collected the majority of this series. These books came out from the mid 1970s until the early 2000s, and the Best of Photojournalism contest still goes on although they seem not to do the physical books anymore. This 15th volume covers the 1989 competition, which was a very strong year in terms of world events — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, the overthrow of Ceausescu, etc. The book is split […]

‘The Habsburgs were the first rulers whose power encompassed the world, and they achieved greatness by luck and by force.’

The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power by Martyn Rady

In The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World by Edward Shawcross

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For all the royal watching going on right now, its the British Royal Family that’s hugging the spotlight. And, really, how could they not? Liz the Second—who we all thought was destined to live forever—shockingly popped her clogs last year. And now her grandson seems to be taking his turn airing out the dirty laundry, much to people’s delight. But the lives of royals are always ripe for high drama, if you are into that kind of thing. So I’m going to ring in the […]

“There is no necessary tradeoff between empathy and assertiveness.”

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level by James K Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns, Robert H. Mnookin

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This is a nice little gem of a negotiation book. Harvard Negotiation Project’s James Sebenius and his co-authors spent a lot of time and research delving deep into the subject and the mind of the man. They look not just into the substance of Henry Kissinger’s negotiation history but also into his specific tactics and philosophy of negotiation. Kissinger himself wrote the foreword to this book and apparently was pretty candid with the authors as they researched and interviewed him. Perhaps most importantly, they also […]

this woman’s work

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley

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Bill Bryson’s delightful At Home: A Short History of Private Life came first, but Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk separates itself from the predecessor by being, well, more intimate! I promise this will be a review of If the Walls Could Talk, but if you are ever in need of a peaceful “sleep read” then I highly recommend plugging into the audio adaptation of Bryson’s book- it is seriously soothing. The biggest difference between At Home and If Walls Could Talk is the female perspective. Bryson’s book was framed around […]

Map porn

The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching

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As regular haunter of r/mapporn with a large appetite for history, The Golden Atlas was a pretty perfect Christmas gift for me, a gorgeously illustrated book featuring lots of ancient maps and the stories of how the lands depicted on them were discovered. Taking us from antiquity up until the Victorian age, when we finally inked in bits of the last of the world’s unknown lands, some of my favourites were those that were based heavily on conjecture. Whether these were the maps of the […]



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