Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Ye Olde Childrearing

Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent's Guide to Raising Flawless Children by Therese O'Neill

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I was a huge fan of O’Neill’s first book, Unmentionable, so when a friend sent along the link for her newest publication, I immediately ordered it from the library. Similar to Unmentionable, O’Neill tackles the crazy of the Victorian era with wit, sarcasm, and a dose of brutal honesty that both criticizes the dark parts of Victorian parenting culture while also contextualizing it in a way that makes it understandable, if not condonable. Where Unmentionable focused on sex, love, and marriage for young women, Ungovernable tackles the next stage […]

In the 19th Century she was first

What Miss Mitchell Saw by Hayley Barrett

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A simple, but not simplistic look at Maria Mitchell and all the amazing things she saw comes to life in What Miss Mitchell Saw. Hayley Barret created a biography that reads as fiction about the first professional female astronomer. Yet, it is not just about what she saw (as what was out there had already been seen by others in the past) but the one very important find in the sky that made her world famous and respected by her peers and even a King. […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

The Voices of the Ignored

The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History, Immigrants, women, & African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle by Margaret S. Creighton

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Until I joined a reenactment group about 6 years ago, I’d never had any interest in the Civil War since its most popular focus is white men shooting each other. Now, this isn’t to say that the experiences of the white, male soldiers consumed by the jaws of war aren’t important, it just means I don’t particularly care what Gen. So-&-So did at noon on July 2nd, 1863. And unfortunately, at least at Gettysburg, ninety-nine percent of the focus is what white men did in […]

“The dark shadow of crime spreads right and left, from the Penitentiary and the Workhouse, over all the institutions, the Asylum, the Alms-House and Charity Hospital; so that, in the minds of the people at large, all suffer alike from an evil repute.”

Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horn

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Damnation Island was a book I pulled off my shelves when quarantining and social distancing began back in March. I had read Ten Days a Madwoman in February and I decided an adult non-fiction trip to Blackwell Island was needed to balance and expand the accounting in Noyes’s book. I was right, there is much important history here – particularly pertinent to our times as we reexamine and revisit the functioning of corrections, and how we as a society care for those around us. Often […]



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