Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Men Are Terrible and Cannot Be Trusted

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a story about Sylvie, a seventeen year old girl, dragged along on an Iron Age reenactment in northern England with her father, Bill. Bill’s enthusiasm for the Iron Age is a hobby; he isn’t traditionally educated in the subject, and jumps at the opportunity to join Professor Jim Slade and his students for what is essentially a two-week summer LARP. He brings his wife, Alison, and his daughter, Sylvie, along for the ride. It becomes obvious early in the novel that Bill […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

Culture Shock

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First Fieldwork was an assigned reading when I took Intro to Anthropology in college. That was a good 15 years ago, and since then I’ve reread this book probably five times. It’s short, it’s interesting, and it’s hilarious. Barbara Gallatin Anderson recounts a fieldwork assignment in the tiny fishing village of Taarnby, Denmark. She and her husband are there to study the changes that urbanization is making to the culture of the small town. To this non-anthropologist, that sounds dull as dishwater, and I’m guessing […]

Going Home

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Last summer, as part of my job as a health educator, I visited a woman at her home who had recently given birth. Newborn tests showed that the baby may have had a serious hemoglobin disorder. The woman spoke no English, and in fact her native language was spoken by such a small population that it had taken a lot of work to find an interpreter, who I had on speaker phone. At one point I asked the interpreter to define hemoglobin, explain that her […]

tramps like us, baby, we were born to run

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The plan was to review this book as my first CBR8 review, but I simply could not stop turning pages. I had to finish it as soon as possible. My one-sentenc review: Born to Run is a book about will, the human spirit, living well, and sticking to the man. It’s very good and inspiring, but a smidge too hyperbolic to be five stars for me. Born to Run has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon and a 4.5 star rating, so the odds are good […]

Guns and Germs and Steel- Oh My!

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Guns, Germs, and Steel has been in my queue for several years. I remember seeing it a Barnes and Noble a long time ago and wanting to read it. I can only assume that was a result of the Pulitzer Prize Winner sticker on the cover. The book is most certainly non-fiction but it isn’t a story. It is a very long research paper. The author states his very clear and concise thesis up front. The book will examine what led certain civilizations to conquer […]



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