Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Have you heard of Pervitin?

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

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One of the weirdest things that’s happened to me as an adult is that I’ve learned how fluid “history” can be. Growing up, my understanding of the concept of history was that smart people figured out what happened, and they told us, and that was it. In college books like Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People’s History of the United States opened up my thinking to the idea that any narrative (historical or otherwise) comes from a point of view and has a […]

“Winston was the only person Randolph truly loved.”

Churchill & Son by Josh Ireland

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If I say “this book was a lot better than I thought it was going to be,” I definitely run the risk of sounding rude, but I was very pleasantly surprised by Churchill & Son. I’m not a politics book type of person, as I tend to find them too dry, but Ireland has written a very engaging and interesting book that deals with a lot of politics in a readable and nuanced way. I was never bored or forcing myself to push through a section […]

Spies Alive

The Torqued Man by Peter Mann

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The Torqued Man is a very difficult novel to pull off. It has to accurately replicate the atmosphere of Nazi Germany in World War II, introduce two queer heroes enmeshed with each other without the Tragic Homosexual trope, present a novel-within-the-novel that tweaks the story without it losing momentum. become a high wire spy tale in the tradition of Furst and LeCarré, and do all of this in a way that entertains while seamlessly blending multiple genres. And man oh man does Peter Mann do it. […]

Pure-blooded animals for the Aryan to kill? Let’s get right on that.

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

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During the late 1930s, Antonina and Jan Źabiński, along with their young son Ryś, were leading an idyllic life as caretakers of a small zoo, set in a parklike setting on the bank of the Vistula River in the Old Town of Warsaw, Poland.  Antonina had a special gift for dealing with animals in need, and their villa, on the zoo grounds, was full of animals that need a bit of extra help, including Ryś’ pet badger, and was fondly known as “The House Under […]

Slow but informative history

Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel

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The second of my trio of books this year related to WWII (All The Light We Cannot See and Exodus), this is also the only non-fiction one.  Monuments tells the story of the group of soldiers in WWII who were part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section. This group was underfunded, unrecognized and very small (at its largest, after the war, it numbered 350 people), yet responsible for saving most of western Europe’s art. The action opens by introducing us to the […]

A little bowl, a big message

A Bowl Full of Peace: A True Story by Caren Stelson

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A Bowl Full of Peace: A True Story is a book that I can tell you: it is a beautiful book about survival, family, and beauty within the ugliness of war. A family heirloom survived the bombing of Nagasaki, but some of the family did not. This based on a true story testament to the why we should never let this happen again. Lovely illustrations accent and compliment the text. I can say that it is written by Caren Stelson and those lovely illustrations are […]



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