Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

you will falsely remember being told about Melmoth by your grandmother’s mother when you were very small

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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There is something immediately nauseating – hear me out- about this book. You can be nauseous when you feel ill, when you ride a roller coaster, when you are nervous, or when you eat too many sweets. There is a feeling of hopeful dread that climbs over you (and all of the characters within) before you have finished reading the first page. There is a feeling that you have been here – in a cafe in Prague, under an overpass in Manila, in a field […]

A Dual Biography that works

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I read Churchill and Orwell because I am a fan of the author, Thomas E. Ricks.  Ricks is best known as a military historian who wrote Fiasco and The Generals, both of which I highly recommend.  This book is a bit of a departure for Ricks but the topic seemed interesting.  Churchill and Orwell is a dual biography of two British men who had similarly parallel lives during WWII-era Great Britain.  I was surprised to find how much the two men had in common, especially […]

Some People Fight Injustice. Some People Perpetrate It.

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Best for: Those looking for a bit of inspiration in tough times; those who want to learn more about a group of WWII women (the Rabbits) who haven’t received a lot of coverage. In a nutshell: Three women’s lives intertwine – Caroline, a retired US Broadway star who volunteers at the French Consulate in NYC, Kasia, a Polish teen who is just starting to assist the resistance, and Herta, a German Doctor who experiments on young girls in a concentration camp. Worth quoting: “To make […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List #13

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The Guns at Last Light is the finale of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson, the first of which, An Army at Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2003.  The series encompasses the history of the United States activity in the European theater of World War II.  An Army at Dawn is about the U.S. Military during the North Africa campaign.  Book two, The Day of Battle, is about the the war in Italy and the Mediterranean; it is subtitled, The War in […]

Stick With This One, It’s Worth It

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This is my first ever experience reading a book before print, and it took a little while for me to get into this one, but once I was in, the payoff was worth it. Never Anyone But You follows Suzanne and Claude (Luci) from falling in love as teenagers in the early 1900s through the many different Paris art movements post World War I, onto their Nazi resistance during World War II, and their final years on the small isle of Jersey. In truth, the first […]

War sucks

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I just recently turned thirty-nine, so forty is just around the corner. Not too long ago, I stumbled on a reading list on the internet: 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. It’s a list with many great books, some of which I’ve already read. However, the list loses some credibility for a number of reasons. First, the blurb states that the list celebrates female writers, but then Gustave Flaubert is one of the authors? Second, and more importantly, Fifty Shades of Grey is on […]



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