Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About needscaffeine

CBR17 Participant

I'm an anthropologist and part-time attorney in public service in the rural south. I'm an enrolled tribal person (sorry not to state my tribe like a decent person to any other tribal folks reading this, but I work at a southern college where I'm perpetually awaiting the anti-DEI axe), and that's a big part of my life. I've had a challenging decade and joined Cannonball Read in 2025 to get back to reading and writing, both of which I adore but had stopped doing outside of work! I lurk a lot but enjoy reading y'all's reviews and posting my own when I can!

needscaffeine's Reviews:

Monstrous witches haunt rural Mexico and a New England college town

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcie

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There’s an odd paradox for Indigenous people and the word “witch.” On the one hand, our medicine people, healers, doctors, priests, and midwives were often vilified with words like “witch doctor” and accused of alignment with various Christian devils, demons, and satans. It’s easy to see a sort of kinship with women who were villified with these words and with pagans from other continents who today sometimes have embraced the term of witch. On the other hand, our traditional tales tell stories of dangerous beings, […]

Was vast social inequality and control inevitable? A dense, meticulously researched final work from anarchist anthropologist David Graeber says “no.”

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, David Wengrow

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I’ve been putting off reading this 704-page book for a few years, believing it deserved time and attention I didn’t have. David Graeber, who died suddenly in 2020, was an anthropologist and activist, an anarchist philosopher who, through confronting social inequality in unrelenting, novel, and thoroughly-source and -reasoned manner carved his way into a central role in the field. I’ve always found Graeber to be able to reorient entire areas of society so they made sense—and nonsense—in novel ways. Debt: The First 5000 Years and […]

The Puppy Primer – An Engaging Guide to Puppy and Human Behavior

The Puppy Primer (Second Ed.) by Patricia B. McConnell, PhD, and Brenda Scidmore

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Recently, someone gave my ex-spouse a puppy, a tiny rat terrier who seems to be composed largely of clever brown eyes and tiny razor-sharp teeth since the remainder of his body wiggles at speeds that make it difficult to fully perceive. Unfortunately, my ex also became very ill, and asked me to care for this small, legged shark, whom my ex (probably because he was sick) hadn’t yet taught not to gnaw on people. I agreed, but I began to pay a price in bloody […]

A friendly guide to owning a car

Mechanic Shop Femme’s Guide to Car Ownership: Uncomplicating Cars for All of Us by Chaya M. Milchtein

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When I was 14, my dad told me that he would teach me to drive on his 1974 Volkswagen van, but first I had to read Zen and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, and we would then take parts of the van apart so I understood how it worked and how to fix it. This was in the ’90s, and, owing to a combination of eternal coolness and bad financial blows, that van was his beloved daily driver, not a restored show piece. The way […]

The Language Warrior’s Manifesto

The Language Warrior's Manifesto: How to Keep Our Languages Alive at All Costs by Anton Treuer (Ojibwe)

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My tribal community has primarily spoken English for a very long time. Growing up, I learned a few words of our language from my grandmother and other folks in social/ceremonial contexts. As an adult, going to college and continuing to live in an urban area far from the tribal homeland, I made a conscious effort to seek out other people from sister tribes (long story, but the federal government moved our ancestors around and effectively split up one nation of people; my tribe is pretty […]



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