Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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When History Repeats itself

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei

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#crb11bingo #TrueStory I am going to write WOW 200 times and OMG for the other 50 words. I am also going to say this the second draft of my review. I found myself just going on about all the little, amazing details to the story. I was near 500 words and could have written another 500. They Called Us Enemy is George Takei’s story in a graphic novel format. Along with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and Harmony Becker the reader sees the years from early/mid-1940s […]

The Bad Kind of Glow in the Dark

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

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I’ve noticed a bit of an interesting trend for me: I’ve started getting a little more into non-fiction. Since I work with a good bit of that kind of thing professionally, I haven’t really done much for spare time reading. And yet here I am with what could be my third(ish) non-fiction review of the year. Unlike my luck with best-selling fiction (generally poor), I seem to have done better of late with the best-selling non-fiction. The Radium Girls is non-fiction, and the best kind, […]

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsberg – Marvelous and Glorious

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik

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For Christmas, my husband got me dissent collar stud earrings as a stocking stuffer. I was delighted, but a little chagrined. I didn’t think I knew enough about Ruth Bader Ginsberg to call me one of her fans, and make me legitimate enough to rock the earrings. But rock them I did, because they make me feel powerful, and they are also adorable – the perfect accessories. But, I wanted to fill a bit of my RBG knowledge gap, so I jumped in the queue […]

Cheating shmeating! In the mid-19th century, Harvard really knew how to rock a scandal.

Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins

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Ooh, I do love a good period true crime drama. From Erik Larson’s much-lauded Devil in the White City, to Kate Summerscale’s lesser-known The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, to Bruce Chadwick’s I Am Murdered (which I reviewed all the way back for CBR5),  you take a  murder that’s at least a century old, add some period costumes, a few blue collar witnesses pitted against high-brow lawyers, and a lot of research, mix well, and you have a perfect cocktail of historical entertainment. I especially enjoy reading […]

Male, Pale, and Yale

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

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Or Harvard. Or West Point. Texas State. But the point remains: this book is about how liberal elites got us into an imperial war. I don’t know how you write a history text better than this. It has exactly what I look for in its subject’s great works: to be good, thorough, and damning. By the end of reading this, I was relieved to be done but thoroughly exhausted at the week-long endeavor, which I was only able to finish in seven days thanks to […]

Outdated gender dynamics, But Topically Dated Politcal Stuff

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Bingo Square Round 2: Home, Something, Home (John Jakes was born in Illinois) When I was in elementary school in Germany, one of the local channels aired Fackeln im Sturm, the TV mini series about two families and best friends on opposing sides of the Civil War.  Between this show and Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze quickly became an important cornerstone in my early tween crushes.  My parents had seen the mini series when we were still in the States, and I am pretty sure we […]



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