Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me by Ron Miscavige with Dan Koon

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Following Escape Camp 14 with Ruthless was a fairly easy transition. The work camps of North Korea have eerie similarities with the SeaOrg work conditions within Scientology. Miscavige makes the association, lumping in Nazi Germany, himself. Ron Miscavige, father of cult leader David Miscagive, left the Church of Scientology in 2012 after 40 decades involvement including 27 years in the SeaOrg. He brought his family, including teenage son David, into the fold and devoted his life to the “church” included traveling to England for classes. At sixteen David left what meager schooling he was still attending to join to SeaOrg full time. David managed […]

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6/14/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:67 |

An Unreliable Narrator Escapes to Freedom

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

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“High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.” Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to be born in a North Korean work camp and successfully escape. Shin’s mother and father were both prisoners in Camp 14 for crimes committed long before Shin was born; Shin himself is the product of his parents’ “reward marriage.” He was born in the camp […]

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6/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:66 |

Broadway to Bluths

Are You Anybody? by Jeffery Tambor

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I am so excited Jill Soloway is writing a book for you. But Jill is an accomplished writer. The following is a short list of what I am: 1. Actor 2. Husband 3. Daddy 4. Grandparent 5. Lecturer 6. Bookstore co-owner Short list of what I am not: 1. Writer So Jeffery Tambor did not set out to write a memoir, he was approached and eventually convinced, but he delivered an A+ series of essays about his personal and professional life. His early life in San Francisco was complicated, his mother had some demons, but mostly happy. He fell in […]

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6/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:65 |

“Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight.”

Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg

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Badkittyuno raved about Openly Straight and its sequel Honestly Ben so, despite my old age and the crotchety nature in which I reacted to the last YA novel I read, I picked it up from the library. It was definitely better than The Upside of Unrequited with slightly more believable, fleshed out main characters. Claire Olivia is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl but she is a minor character, and not a love interest, so I’ll let that slide. Rafe was openly gay in liberal Boulder, Colorado but chooses to go to boarding school in Massachusetts where he presents himself as straight. He doesn’t […]

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6/9/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:64 |

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

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I was always a voracious reader but in reality I recycled the same 10 or 15 books a year with a few new ones sprinkled in for good measure. This isn’t a bad system but it would have made for a very repetitive Cannonball profile and one thing my CBR journey has pushed me to do in the past three and a half years is to read new books: different genres and entire author oeuvres etc. So now that I’m on my fourth year I figure it’s time to reread my version of the “classics” beginning with Ender’s Game.  “I’ve watched through […]

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6/9/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:63 |

Am I getting to old for this shit?

Becky Albertalli by The Upside of Unrequited

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As I tiptoe closer to my 30s I am constantly reminded that I am not a Young Adult. This isn’t to say The Upside of Unrequited isn’t a wonderful fine YA novel, I’m just old. I just struggle to connect to today’s teen stories although I wish YA had been this diverse when I was an actual young adult. Also, I had to google to difference between pansexual and bisexual (used in Being Jazz and Upside) which made me feel old and out of touch. “I mean, here’s the thing I don’t get. How do people come to expect that their crushes will be reciprocated? Like, how […]

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5/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:62 |

My biggest complaint is what makes this book so important

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings

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My biggest complaint about Being Jazz is that Jazz Jennings is such a typical teenage girl who writes like I imagine most 15 years old girls do- lots of exclamation points, humble bragging and boy craziness- which was at times a little grating.  But this complaint is its biggest strength because Jazz Jennings isn’t a typical teenage girl- Jazz Jennings was born Jayron and began her transition from biologically male to presenting as female before she entered Kindergarten. Jazz has been lucky in her upbringing; her parents quickly came around to the understanding that their son Jayron was actually a daughter in the […]

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5/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:61 |

“There were human beings and there was Audrey Hepburn.”

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson

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Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. was my selection for this quarter’s Book Club, although it wasn’t selected. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic toward a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn’t have to be punished.” While Wasson’s main goal is to educate his audience on how Breakfast at Tiffany’s went from novella to motion picture but it is also a brief history about the shift from movies in the ’50s to movies in the ’60s. This shift was a more interesting topic than the filming […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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5/28/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:60 |

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