Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The Future is History by Masha Gessen

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This book is structured as a kind of oral history (though written in the third person) in which four main characters and their lives tell the story of Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1970s through 2015 or so. The subtitle “How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” is answered through these stories as well as through Masha Gessen’s narration as historian and journalist adding historical detail and context as necessary. Gessen spends a lot of time in this book discussing definitions and how they do and […]

Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground

Battlefield by Peter Svenson

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A memoir from 1988 or so about Peter Svenson, a visual artist, who buys a farms in the Shenadoah Valley that just so happens to be one of the sites of a series of battles around the city of Harrisonburg, VA (in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley and home to James Madison University). The Battle of Cross Keys saw JC Fremont for the North meeting up with Jackson, Ewell, and Trimble of the South and being turned back, despite superiors numbers (a battle result […]

How to Read a Book (kind of)

How to Read a Book by Charles van Doren and Mortimer Adler

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This is probably not going to be the worst book all year, but it will probably be the most obnoxious. Ostensibly, this book teaches you how to read a book. Cool. How do I read this book then? Not answered! The book goes into the process of reading and discusses the levels of reading: basic comprehension through dialectical reading (putting texts into conversation with each other or as parts of communal conversations on topics). And again all fine. But where this book feels downright silly […]

Dust Tracks on a Road

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

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Zora Neal Hurston’s 1942 memoir is a memoir in a more classic sense, in that it covers childhood to publication. This means the book covers close to fifty years of her life. This means that she’s already grown up, gone to college, published several anthropological texts, several novels and short stories. It also means that in a way, she’s made her stamp on the public world. There’s still a lot of living for Zora Neale Hurston and of course one of the things we’ve learned […]

Tool of War

Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi

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The first book in this series, Ship Breaker, opens in such a way that only a tiny sliver of the world the book inhabitats is available to the reader. This is mostly because of the narrative perspective employed. It’s very close third person, and we only slowly begin to understand different things about the world. The second book feels like more of the same, except we split the narration among a few characters, still in third, and the world feels quite a bit bigger. This […]

King Leopold

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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Hochschild begins this history with a recalling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It would be impossible not to. For most people in the world, if they know anything about the slave trade, enforced labor, and violent atrocities that happened in the Congo under the reign of King Leopold of Beligum and then the Belgian government, they primarily know about it because of Conrad’s book. Conrad’s book occupies a tense space in English literature for a few reasons. One, his language, his ideology, and his […]



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