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:

A Great Literary Love

Centennial Reflections by American Writers by Susan Shillinglaw, Ed.

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My father loves John Steinbeck and he passed that love down to me. Years ago, he and I went to the John Steinbeck festival at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. While there, I bought Centennial Reflections by American Writers, edited by Susan Shillinglaw. This small book is a collection of writings by various authors about Steinbeck and his impact on them and the literary world. In terms of my own relationship with Steinbeck, I’ve read many of his works, including his masterpiece the Grapes of […]

“No meaning–that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end”

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

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We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference–all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There is no context for our lives.” Steven Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell is a horror book without the gore. A man named Soren dies of brain cancer in his 40’s and finds himself confronted by a lesser demon who tells Soren and some others that the only true religion is Zoroastrianism, and as none of them follow […]

“It was as though they hadn’t seen me, as though I was here, and yet not here.”

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist–can’t you see that?” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is an electrifying study of a young Black man and his different experiences as he journeys through a racist society. The narrator, who is never named, starts the book telling the reader he lives in the sealed off basement of a Harlem apartment, the dark and cold offset by over 1,300 electric lights. The very first line of the book is “I am an invisible man.” In the beginning he recollects an […]

Better Than the Last Ones, With a Side of Homophobia

Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh

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I pick up Ngaio Marsh’s books when I want an old fashioned mystery that isn’t an Agatha Christie (though no one beats Christie in this genre, period). However, they keep letting me down, though they are certainly inoffensive for the most part. The last two Marsh books I reviewed were rather dull. Marsh’s Death in Ecstasy was better, although still not Christie caliber. Nigel Bathgate, journalist and similarly dim Hastings to Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn’s Poirot, finds himself at a mysterious religious service at a place […]

The Harsh Law of Memory

The Accident by Elie Wiesel

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“I knew that our suffering changes us. But I didn’t know it could also destroy others.” “I told him what I had never told anyone. My chidhood, my mystic dreams, my religious passions, my memories of German concentration camps, my belief that I was now just a messenger of the dead among the living.” Content warnings: death, suicide, sexual assault In Elie Wiesel’s The Accident, protagonist Eliezer is a survivor of the Holocaust, where he lost his grandmother, mother, and others in the death camps. […]

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

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Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell The title of this review is the subtitle to Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, an engrossing work about Belgian king Leopold the II and his disastrous, murderous, exploitative impact on Africa’s Congo region. The Congo was first contacted by Portugal in 1491 and was taken over by European colonialism by the the late 1800s. Hochschild makes good use […]



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