Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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With help from my friends

The Friendship Train: A True Story of Helping and Healing by Debbie Levy and Boris Kulikov

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When you think of World War II you don’t usually think of a sweet story about friendship, hope and caring, but that is what The Friendship Train: A True Story of Helping and Healing after World War II is about.  Author Debbie Levy tells of how after the devastating world war, Europe faced a brutal winter. Low on supplies, food, and practically everything needed for survival, it was figured most would not make it. But in an attempt to help, (from publisher description) spearheaded by […]

Forest Euphoria: Mostly memoir but with cool (and some bummer) queer nature facts

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

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I have been in the throes of moving and unpacking for the last 6 weeks (give or take), so reading has been slow and distracted. Even getting through this 6 hour audiobook took 2 weeks, and I was certainly distracted through most of it. So definitely take this review with a grain of salt. The book seems to be broken down in the sections that match a set of anecdotes from the author’s life with thematically similar creatures in nature that highlight queerness, diversity in […]

Man on the Run

Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original by Howard Bryant

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I like baseball and I like books, so it only stands to reason that I like books about baseball, too. But I do have reservations. I tend to prefer reading books about the game as a whole over a distinct period of time, or an account of one particular team or season. I’m less enamored of baseball player biographies, like Howard Bryant’s Rickey. They tend to fall into the trap of being repetitively structured, methodically going through a player’s career one season at a time, […]

Between the Accident and the Incident

Curse of the Blumenthals by Phyllis Karas

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Three generations of journalist Phyllis Karas’s family are marked by two great tragedies – the car crash which killed six members of the family, and the murder committed by the first grandchild born after that accident hardly twenty years later. This is an interesting mash-up of a book – part family history, part true crime, and sometimes even a scrapbook. Karas dives into the crimes which impacted her family, whether they were those who committed them or the victims, studying how their effects rippled through […]

Iceland Presents…. Ms. President

Vigdis: A Book About the World's First Female President by Rán Flygenring

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We are always talking about “we need more women in politics.” Well, we are just not looking in the right places. In 1980 Iceland elected its first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. And the book Vigdis: A Book About the World’s First Female President by Rán Flygenring shows us the background of that historical event. Not only was she the first of Iceland she is considered the first woman to be democratically elected president in 1980 (Isabel Perón of Argentina was the first woman president in […]

Do Hard Things

Smile, or You're Doing it Wrong by Andy Glaze

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As I write this, Andy Glaze is almost 100 miles into the Arizona Monster 300 Trail Race. It’s over 300 miles of mostly trail running with a cut off of seven days. It’s really beyond my comprehension. I’ve backpacked about 250 miles, but it took me three weeks. Ten to fifteen miles of hiking per day with plenty of sleep is nothing like what’s happening in Arizona right now. I stumbled upon Andy on Instagram. He is a fire battalion chief in California and an ultrarunner. […]



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