Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About esmemoria

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In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

Contemplation and Slime

Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs

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Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman is one of my favorite books of all time. I came across it at my grandparents’ house when I was about 10 years old. It is an illustrated book about the daily life of a bogeyman, Fungus, and his family. Along the way, we learn about bogey life, which is simultaneously thoroughly disgusting and charmingly sweet. The book is a day in the life of Fungus. His job, like other bogies, is to travel at night from the bogey life […]

Exploring the Making of Masculinity

Dude You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School by C.J. Pascoe

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Note: The homophobic slur in the book’s title is used in a very particular and deliberate way in this book. Trigger warnings for anyone that term disturbs; the review will better explain its usage. This book examines the way gendered and sexualized identifications and the institutional ordering of these identifications in a California high school both reinforce and challenge inequality among students.” Defining masculinity as mastery builds on the definitions of masculinity…in which boys make it clear that the most un-masculine position is a fag […]

“The age of atrocity has wounded the word”

Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit by Lawrence Langer

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Lawrence Langer’s Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit is one of the most brilliant books on the Holocaust I have ever read. Langer tackles the meaning of survivorship in the death camps, using language as a lens to examine the experience of atrocity and annihilation and those that did and did not survive. Langer divides his book into four sections: Language as Refuge; Auschwitz: The Death of Choice; Elie Wiesel: Divided Voice in a Divided Universe; and Gertrud Kolmer and Nelly Sachs: […]

Painfully Unfunny

Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner

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This is going to be short and to the point. I HATED Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe. I had a friend a long time ago who loved Leyner and the title of the book cracked me up. Well, the title was the first and last thing to give me even a twitch of amusement. There isn’t really a plot, per se, just strings of absurd situations and painfully unfunny humor. It’s meant to be some kind of absurdist post-modern take on fame and culture, but […]

Prison for Profit

American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer

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They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment, because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.” In 2014, Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer went undercover as a guard at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana. Winn Correctional was a for-profit prison run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), later renamed to the deceptively publicly responsible CoreCivic. American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment delves into the history of prisons-for-profit and Bauer’s […]

Pulp Fiction

And Dream of Evil by Tedd Thomey

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This book was a ton of fun. I have a 1954 copy of Tedd Thomey’s And Dream of Evil, a pulp fiction masher with a lurid cover and that old book smell. This is a true tough guy romp with pert breasted dames and lots of fistfights and shoot outs. Mysteries on top of mysteries unfold at a brisk pace. The main character John Rennick–a retired Marine from World War II who now works on oil rigs–wakes up after a beating on a hotel roof […]



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