I began this book in October, and it seemed a bit of a slog, and I’m not sure why. I love Bryson’s signature style of history enlivened with juicy tidbits of whimsy. The people involved are interesting. The stories are compelling. The year, 1927, was the year my mother was born, adding an extra element of interest for me. Maybe it was just that there were too many stories, too much to keep track of, for someone reading it piece-meal. 1927 was a busy, busy […]
Motherhood, am I right?
I reviewed another of Jessica Valenti’s books (“The Purity Myth”) for last year’s Cannonball Read, and she actually acknowledged my review on Twitter. That was a very happy day. I knew about this book but hadn’t read it; I discovered it on Audible on Friday ended up listening to it pretty much straight through. Ms. Valenti is a feminist author and mother of her young daughter Layla. Layla was born SUPER early, spending her first weeks in the NICU. Ms. Valenti spends time talking about […]
King of the severed hands
This work describes King Leopold II’s land grab of the Congo River area during the scramble for Africa of the late 19th century, which led to the deaths of 8 to 10 million Africans, the destruction of their societies, and the devastation of the area’s wild rubber plants. Each chapter takes on a different character or episode through the history. Starting with Stanley’s quest to find Livingstone and journeying through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hochschild does a fabulous job telling this brutal story through the eyes of […]
Are You Kidding Me, Another One?
There’s a chance that if you’re reading this review, you might not be an active participant in Cannonball Read 6. Maybe you didn’t sign up, unsure of whether or not you could participate to your satisfaction, or you missed the deadline, or you just wanted to cheerlead from the sidelines, or any other number of reasonable and perfectly fine reasons. Nonetheless, you could always try to read fifty two Cannonball Read reviews this year! In fact, you might even be able to read fifty two […]
How did we get human rights?
This semester I am taking a graduate class on the history of human rights. It has been fantastic even though snow has interrupted it twice now. One of our first books was Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt. She examines the language of human rights as it emerged with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Declaration of Independence. She argues that before and during that time period we see a change in thinking and a rise in empathy towards other people. This coincided […]
Who killed Kurt Cobain?????
Since I am essentially close to being an old person (30th birthday next month!), I decided to revisit my youth with my first book in the Cannonball Read, Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain written by Max Wallace and Ian Halperin. As you can probably tell from the title, this book is about a well-known theory that Courtney Love of the band Hole had some degree of involvement in the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain of the epic grunge band Nirvana. The […]