Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fred’s Big Feelings and how they shaped us

Fred's Big Feelings: The Life and Legacy of Mister Rogers by Laura Renauld

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Fred’s Big Feelings: The Life and Legacy of Mister Rogers is a love story to Fred Rogers.vand Bridgett Barrager start this book with the iconic living room many of us grew up “in”. Then they head back to 1930’s Philadelphia where we see how Fred Rogers became Mr. Rogers: a boy teased for his weight and had asthma, so he was unable to play like other kids. And finally, we end back in that famous living room. The life, times and thought of Rogers comes […]

A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

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A memoir turned polemic turned treatise about death in the United States, this book begins with the narrator, Caitlin Doughty leaving college with a degree in Medieval Studies (focusing on death and death rituals) and taking a job in the crematory industry in San Fransisco. We jump right in and follow the new hire as she’s shaving an elderly dead man for the funeral preparation. Like Doughty, we too are brand new to this world and like her getting a hands on initiation into it. […]

“It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth.”

In Order to Live: a North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park, Maryanne Vollers

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First, I feel a little bad rating In Order to Live: a North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom three stars. Park’s life story to the point of her writing this book, just 21 years, is full of the sort of deprivations, suffering, drive to survive, and eventually hope that make you want to love the work. Yeonmi Park’s life deserves notice and her book deserves to be read. Unfortunately for me, it felt more like homework than a captivating read. Second, there are some books […]

Florida Gothic

This Is Not My Beautiful Life by Victoria Fedden

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I’ve read that the Florida Man archetype is due in large part to police blotters being unrestricted in that state compared to others, but I have to say, it really seems like Florida is the USA’s very own Night Vale. I just reviewed The Orchid Thief and said it was basically Tiger King as written by the New Yorker; this is Tiger King mixed with Say Anything as written by Us Weekly. We find Victoria Fedden eight months pregnant and staying with her mother while […]

If you liked Tiger King…

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

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It’s a testament to Susan Orlean that she can make any subject seem interesting, but she didn’t have to work that hard with John Laroche. He’s the spiritual predecessor of Joe Exotic, a toothless obsessive known for big-picture ideas improperly realized who, with members of the Florida Seminole tribe, was arrested for taking bromeliads and orchids out of protected land in the Everglades to create a greenhouse business as a moneymaker for the natives. His main objective is to cultivate the Ghost Orchid, an orchid […]



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