Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Now A Major Motion Picture And Sadly A Common Story on The News

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

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  It has been over 50 years since James Baldwin penned this powerful fiction, yet very little seems to have changed. If Beale Street Could Talk straddles genres: it is a tender love story between Tish and Fonny, a slice-of-life drama of the 1970s New York Black experience, and a tense courtroom procedural. While some cultural references have aged, the catalyst—Fonny’s false arrest by a cop who takes personal offense at his existence—remains as common today as it was then. Baldwin’s prose lifts these characters […]

Black AF History: Boring…AF? (Or Maybe Just Hard To Read)

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

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I will come right out of the gate and say I approached this book the wrong way. I thought it was going to be more of a straight-through read, and it’s definitely something to read in chunks instead. Otherwise everything gets overwhelming and your brain just…shuts down. So perhaps for someone who didn’t try to power through it in a few weeks, or maybe even for someone who listened to the audiobook in its entirety, this book wasn’t…Boring AF. But I definitely found myself wandering […]

“The privilege of living now is that I can seat myself at the master’s table – the table of my white ancestor, a slaveholder – and interpret his world, and he has no say.”

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty

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I think to understand what The Cooking Gene is, you have to have a picture of its author. I’ve known Michael Twitty on Twitter for about a decade, Museum Twitter can be a small space sometimes in the best possible ways. Besides being a hoot to spend time with during political debates, Twitty is also a Culinary Historian focusing on the foodways of Africa, enslaved African Americans, African America and the African and Jewish diasporas. Basically, he’s one of the people you want to talk […]

A Mr. Darcy With Heat

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Please note this book will be released May 7, 2019.  Wow. What a wonderful retelling of Pride and Prejudice. Only the Mr. Darcy character is gender swapped and instead of being an upperclass nobleman, we have a young surgeon whose family is descended from Indian royalty (Trisha Raje) I initially didn’t like that Dev had focused on the Mark Darcy character first, but I get why she did […]



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