Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Activist and leader

Little People, Big Dreams: Vanessa Nakate by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara

by Leave a Comment

As I said with my Lenny Henry review, I recently refound the Little People, Big Dreams series, with their new people or new to most children biography series. When I found Vanessa Nakate I said, “That name sounds familiar, who is she again?” Then I realized she was that Vanessa Nakate, the young woman who had her image cropped out of the photograph that included other climate change activists. This young woman knew that she was not just being cropped out of a photograph, but […]

How to Make A Difference

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next) by Dean Spade

by Leave a Comment

Best for: Anyone who is interested in building community and addressing challenges while working outside the traditional methods. In a nutshell: Author Spade discusses the concept of mutual aid and how it differs from the concepts of non-profit and charity work, and offers tips for successful solidarity work. Worth quoting: (There is a lot, but the below paragraph I think helped me to shift what changing the world means to me.) “Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the context of professionalized nonprofit […]

Standing up for the community

Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?)  by Mary Fairhurst Breen 

by Leave a Comment

Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?) by Mary Fairhurst Breen is a clever nonfiction book about everyday people who have made a name for themselves by just being themselves. We might not know them by that name (some people “only” fought the inclusion of a Chick-fil a on their college campus that resulted in Senator Graham making a fool of himself) but they made sure that others can have the freedom of being themselves, being represented, and finding ways to make it […]

An emotional YA in verse

Forever is Now by Mariama J. Lockington

by Leave a Comment

This book is such an emotional ride and I found it near-impossible to put down. Sadie has been coping with her generalized anxiety for years, but after she watches cops unjustly attack a young Black woman, she is suddenly finding it impossible to walk down the front stairs because “what if what if what if.” As she works on coping and healing and adding new tools to her tool box, Sadie is also trying to use her platform and her voice to bring more attention […]

Not Exactly a Guide, But Maybe An Outline

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright

by 2 Comments

Best for: Anyone looking for an easy-to-digest outline of the options we have for moving society away from capitalism. In a nutshell: In six short but packed chapters, author Wright explores the problems of capitalism, the various ways of fighting it, and what is needed to accomplish that. Worth quoting: “The claim that capitalism harms democracy and freedom is more complex than simply proposing that capitalism is opposed to freedom and democracy. Rather, the logic is that capitalism generates severe deficits in realizing the values […]

Disappointing

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm

by Leave a Comment

Best for: I’m really not sure, and I’ll get to that in the review. In a nutshell: Author (and climate activist) Malm attempts to argue in favor of stronger action by the public where it comes to climate change and fossil fuel. Worth quoting: “We face an ostensible paradox here, in that the US is a vastly more violent society — as measured by the diffusion of guns, the incidence of mass shootings, the civilians killed by police, the veneration of armed heroes in popular […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo