Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Not to be devastated by my mistake, but instead to be motivated. He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness.”

Spare by Prince Harry

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I had no intention of reading Prince Harry’s memoir. Until I did. I should have known I’d cave, I’m a sucker for memoirs. There’s something about hearing a person’s story in their own words, particularly if that story is contested in some way, as Prince Harry’s has always been. What Spare is, at its core, is a person reckoning with the way in which they were raised, and the very real ways grief and trauma informed their experience of the world. That is the piece […]

A Civil Rights Icon

My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King

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Like many white folk who studied the Civil Rights Movement on a surface level, I always assumed Coretta Scott King fully played the Dutiful Wife. She tended to the children, kept the house, lifted the spirits of her famous husband, mourned with dignity and carried on his legacy as she got older. Well, she did do those things. But she did so much more and she deserves to be remembered as more than The Wife. I’ve always had a curiosity about Coretta Scott King ever […]

“I had confirmed my belief that I could walk into a cage of big cats and more importantly, walk back out again.”

Wild Animal Circus: True Tales From Carson & Barnes Circus by Dennis J. Younger

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CBR14Bingo: Snakes (there are snakes in this book) Continuing my dive into circus animal trainer memoirs with this self-published look into working the big cat act at Carson & Barnes in 1977-1978. This is a very plainly written, minimally edited book that is basically a day by day journal of his time on the show and a few pages about him working at a roadside zoo type attraction in Florida afterwards. It was interesting in terms of the facts and his honesty about the mistreatment […]

“The Circus has a great obligation to the people of America.” (Irving Feld)

Tiger, Tiger: My 25 Years with the Big Cats by Charly Baumann

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CBR14Bingo: Star (Charly clearly sees himself as a star, and he was) This was a pretty fast and straight forward autobiography of Charly Baumann’s twenty-five years of circus life. It’s not the type of autobiography where the author does a lot of introspection, but it’s an enjoyable read and a good look into European and American circus post-WWII and into the 1970s. His descriptions of his training methods and the long, difficult process of carefully training tigers was interesting. There are also a lot of […]

“Whatever the hardships involved in being connected with it, this was the circus; and it was pure magic.”

Circus Doctor by J.Y. Henderson (as told to Richard Taplinger)

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CBR14Bingo: Elephant (there are a bunch of elephants in this book) Circus Doctor is, as its straight forward title suggests, an autobiography of a circus veterinarian. At the time he wrote this book, J.Y. Henderson had been working for Ringling for ten years, and from some cursory Googling it looks like he ended up working there for over forty. You can tell from the book how caring and passionate he is about caring for the vast variety of animals under his care, so it makes sense […]

An entertaining and eye opening tour through Dave Grohl’s extraordinary life (so far)

The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

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The new pseudo-autobiography, The Storyteller, from Foo Fighters frontman/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl is not conventional. This makes sense since neither is its author. Rather than telling his life story in chronological order, the book is structured as a series of anecdotes that hit significant events mostly in the order they occurred. Whenever I am reading a biography I always dread the beginning chapters as the author goes into detail about their parents, family, and childhood. I tend to skim these parts because, for the most […]



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