Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We’re all so f*cked

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

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It took me ages to finish this book. Not because I had troubles reading it, the language in this is in fact incredibly fluid, I would even say that German prose hardly gets better than this. It took me so long because the dawning realisation that people don’t change, they don’t ever change, is a lot to bear. The sheer relatability of this upset me to the core and it should reach so many more people. The World of Yesterday is the memoir of Stefan […]

A Kennedy I know little about.

The Kennedy Debutante by Kerri Maher

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“If you didn’t know already that Kathleen’s a fighter,” said Rose, her normally shrill voice unusually smooth and low, “then you haven’t been paying attention.” Growing up as a Kennedy woman comes with a specific set of rules. The first being: marry a good Catholic boy from a notable family. The second being: Once you’re married, your only jobs are to have children and keep a full social calendar. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy is aware of what is expected of her as she is presented to […]

World War II meets King Arthur’s Court

The Metropolitans by Carol Goodman

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Set in WWII New York, four kids find themselves at the MET on a cold Sunday afternoon, each dealing with a hand far heavier than any teen should be dealt. Walt was sent to live with family in the US to keep out of Hitler’s grasp. Kiko is a young Chinese girl who looks too much like the enemy to ever be trusted. Madge has been separated from her siblings as a result of her father’s overwhelming grief over her mother’s passing and all she […]

Not the plucky pilot story I expected…

Flyboys by James Bradley

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Flyboys is a true, brutally honest and gut wrenching account of World War II on the Pacific front, focusing on “war in the third dimension” more commonly known as air combat. The story starts at Pearl Harbor, moving through the United States’ clamor to build aircraft and train pilots, to the napalm bombing of Japan and finally the dropping of the two atomic bombs. It’s highlights all the key players in the uprising of military flying: An introduction to Hap Arnold, the leader of the […]

crystalclear read my mind!

The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian

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Way back in the olden days of 2020, the amazing crystalclear sent some inspired picks my way for CBR Book Exchange. Hooray! I kicked off the new year with one of their thoughtful additions to my TBR pile; I had wanted to read Storm Front for some time thanks to the lovely folks here at CBR. The other book, The Light in the Ruins, was a book with which I was unfamiliar. I was immediately excited and impressed after reading the cover copy, as I […]

“Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators …. But they don’t carry it the way victims do.“

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisenger, Steven Scott, Harmony Becker

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Cbr12bingo Shelfie This graphic novel geared toward young readers is an eye opening first hand account of the Takei family’s experience in the US’s Japanese internment camps during WWII. World renowned actor George Takei relates his childhood memories of being uprooted and shipped across the country with his family and reveals his subsequent struggle to come to terms with the injustice and trauma of those years. Even though many of us may have heard about the camps before (thanks in part to the hard work […]



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