Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Winston Churchill was a real one

Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

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  I should start this review by saying that I knew next to nothing about Winston Churchill before reading this book. I knew even less about the Boer War. That being said, Winston Churchill was a real badass. Other good descriptors would be, “arrogant”, “obnoxious”, “tenacious”, and “remarkably lucky”. He contained multitudes. This book profiles Churchill’s life during early war campaigns and through the end of the Boer War. He was interested in war not because of the righteousness of the cause but because he […]

Presidential…or How to Not Be like Donald Trump

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

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So I am a moron. I had no idea there were two other books before this one. I felt like I got plopped into Theodore Roosevelt’s life and felt confused. Once I realized that I was on the third book I felt better since I was all, why is the book acting as if I read about Theodore Roosevelt before now? I have to say though that my attention kept straying away while reading this. I thought that Morris does a good job of bringing […]

the argument is, we are excluded from the argument

Tracker by Alexis Wright

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Tracker Tilmouth was a member of the Stolen Generation – his older, lighter-skinned siblings were taken away from their parents and sent to white families in the south, while he and two younger brothers were taken away to a mission more than a thousand kilometres further north. Tracker’s ties to both northern and central Aboriginal communities stayed with him his whole life, and were one of these reasons he became such an influential figure in the struggle for Aboriginal civil rights.   Tracker’s life story would […]

Coffee Reading Lite

The Monk of Mokha by David Eggers

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As my CBR handle suggests, I like coffee shops, both for the lattes and the atmosphere. So when I was in Chicago recently, I wanted to try out one of the trendy places as my touristy thing. At Intelligentsia Coffee, I saw this book for sale. I didn’t buy it then. I saw the same book a few days later, this time in paperback, for sale at a publisher exhibit. I didn’t buy it then. I did however, upon my return home, acquire said book […]

How many rules am I to break before you understand that your double standards don’t mean sh*t to me?

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu

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  Originally published in French (in two volumes) as Culottées This was such a great read! I was familiar with Bagieu’s work from back when she had her blog (Ma vie est tout à fait fascinante) but had never read one of her books. Needless to say, I am going to remedy that ASAP. Brazen is a collection of graphic bios of women who refused to live according to the rules imposed by society. Some of them are very famous, some of them have been […]

A Dual Biography that works

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I read Churchill and Orwell because I am a fan of the author, Thomas E. Ricks.  Ricks is best known as a military historian who wrote Fiasco and The Generals, both of which I highly recommend.  This book is a bit of a departure for Ricks but the topic seemed interesting.  Churchill and Orwell is a dual biography of two British men who had similarly parallel lives during WWII-era Great Britain.  I was surprised to find how much the two men had in common, especially […]



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