Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Six stories, one War

Survivors of the Holocaust: True Stories of Six Extraordinary Children by Kath Shackelton, Zane Whittingham and Ryan Jones

by Leave a Comment

This is a controversial start to my review of Survivors of the Holocaust: True Stories of Six Extraordinary Children by editor Kath Shackelton: Yes, I think we need stories about the Jewish experiences of the Holocaust. Yes, we need the children’s stories. And thankfully we can have survivor stories. However, we know those stories. I would love to see more stories about the other people who were persecuted as well. I want a mix of stories as I do not want anyone’s story to be […]

Is the Pope Catholic? 

The Bad Popes by E. R. Chamberlin

by Leave a Comment

CBR18 Bingo – Sheep: These guys are shepherds. The Bad Popes by E. R. Chamberlin is aggressively non-religious. If I read this book without knowing about Catholicism, I wouldn’t have picked up that ‘pope’ is supposed to be a religious role. Although I don’t think anyone has ever read this book without knowing about Catholicism or what a pope is. The popes in the book weren’t selected because they were the worst (but they might have been). They were selected because their reigns directly led to […]

A story of growing up with oppression that’s equal parts hilarious and heartwarming

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

by Leave a Comment

CBR18 BINGO: Or, because it gave me a much clearer perspective on South African during the apartheid “Run for cover. Run and hide. I knew that as a five-year-old. Had I lived a different life, getting thrown out of a speeding minibus might have fazed me. I’d have stood there like an idiot, going, ‘What’s happening Mom? Why are my legs so sore?’ But there was none of that. Mom said ‘run,’ and I ran. Like the gazelle runs from the lion, I ran.” This […]

CBRBINGO: Friends—”I was most flattered when I was called the Steven Spielberg of Sitcoms, and in response to that, Steven called me and told me that he wanted to be known as the James Burrows of movies.”

Directed by James Burrows by James Burrows

by Leave a Comment

I bought this at Book Outlet earlier this year (or late last year? what is time) and didn’t feel any particular rush to get to it. Then James Burrows died in June, and now just felt like the right time. This is a career-focused memoir told by James Burrows to Eddy Friedfield, who compiled it all into a book. You can definitely tell that Burrows is not a writer (a fact that he opines at least four times throughout the book—is this irony or what?) […]

“We all love an easy buck.”

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin

by Leave a Comment

CBR18 BINGO: Wealth because much wealth was gained and lost “Temptation has driven  human folly for centuries, whether the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the market manias of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. Each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” I’m old enough to remember the 1987 stock market crash. The dot-com bubble of the early 2000s dashed my hopes of getting rich off of the stock options I […]

When you want a job done right, send in the Vermont gal

Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites by Sandra Neil Wallace and Nancy Carpenter

by Leave a Comment

Ursula Marvin didn’t have rocks in the head, but she had rocks on the brain! And meteorites and all sorts of neat science things. She was a girl who was told “learn to cook.” And instead, she decided to cook up some good trouble by finding moon rocks, meteorites and more in the harsh Antarctic landscape. This picture book biography, Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites by Sandra Neil Wallace and illustrator Nancy Carpenter is a fun introduction to a woman […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo