Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ElCicco

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Married, mom of two, history PhD, feminist. I've been participating in Cannonball Read since CBR4. I love to read, and writing reviews keeps me from reading without thinking. I feel like I owe it to the authors who entertain me to savor their creations. It's like slowing down and enjoying a delicious meal instead of bolting your food. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ElCicco's Quick Questions interview.)

ElCicco's Reviews:

Starting the new year with the most depressing book I’ve ever read

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

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Unintentionally, I am starting CBR12 with one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Of Mice and Men is a short novel — a “play/novelette” in the words of its author, John Steinbeck — published in 1937 and turned into a play and film almost immediately. I have to confess that I have no recollection of reading Steinbeck in my school days, but my 10th grader is going to be reading this soon so I thought I would check it out. I recommend […]

The Monsters are the Heroes

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin

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Back when I was a kid, I loved reading about Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. I read about them in grade school and then, while taking Latin in high school, I read even more. Our copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology got quite a work out. But then, I moved on to other interests and pretty much forgot about mythology until recently, when people like novelist Madeline Miller and translator Emily Wilson have put the gods and goddesses back on my radar. Wake, Siren is […]

The redemptive power of empathy

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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Lincoln in the Bardo is a fitting novel to read during November, the month of the dead. Set in a Washington, DC, cemetery in February 1862, the novel combines real historical events and an imagined spiritual realm. This is a story about death and loss, moving on (or not), and redemption. As in the film The Sixth Sense, the dead of Oak Hill Cemetery don’t know they’re dead (or if they do, they are not saying so). These souls refer to their coffins as “sick […]

A well-rounded portrait of a rock icon

Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren

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Janis Joplin has been the subject of a number of biographies. She is an irresistible topic after all. A rising star, a trailblazer for women in rock whose passion and emotion were evident in every song she sang, she lived hard and died young. Janis performed at Monterey and Woodstock, palled around with other musical greats of the ‘60s and died of a heroin overdose while at the height of her artistic powers. Hers is a story of triumph and tragedy combined. In this biography, […]

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Maria Longworth Storer: From Music and Art to Popes and Presidents by Constance J. Moore and Nancy M. Broermann

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As a native Cincinnatian, I am familiar with the name Longworth and that family’s connection to local history. Maria Longworth Storer was the founder of and one of the creators at the world renowned Rookwood Pottery. This new biography of Maria Longworth Storer opened my eyes not just to this formidable woman’s business acumen, artistic sensibility and philanthropy, which were already well known and documented, but also to her religious and political views and ambitions. Maria Longworth Storer came from a wealthy society family, but […]



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