Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

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After graduating from college, Chris McCandless vanished from his former life and took to the road. The next that his family heard about him was several years later, when he was discovered to have starved to death in the remote Alaskan wilderness. I love Krakauer’s writing, astute and lyrical, and the way he tells this story makes me feel like I’m peering into the abyss of mortality he describes encountering on his ascent of Devils Thumb. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books […]

Empress

Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World by Emma Southon

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Happy Women’s History Month! What better way to observe it than celebrating the most powerful woman in Roman history? I’ve read a lot of books on the Julio-Claudians recently and this is probably the best. Maybe not even “probably.” Emma Southon does a great job explaining how Agrippina’s life was the fabric that wove the narrative of the dynasty together. She was born the year after Augustus’ death and she died during the reign of her son, the last of the family line. She held […]

White Privilege Pyramid Scheme

Hey Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson

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Hey Hun is the story of Emily Lynn Paulson’s time in an MLM. She is the narrator of her own audiobook. Emily changes the name of the MLM to protect herself from being sued, but she doesn’t really level anything particularly shocking against the company. The company uses the standard techniques of an MLM in that the people who start the MLM make money by recruiting more people into the company, and the people at the bottom of the pyramid who joined the company last […]

Fashionable People Doing Unfashionable Things

Deliberate Cruelty, Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century by Roseanne Montillo

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Content Warning: This book deals with murder, as the title suggests. The book also addresses spousal abuse and suicide. This review mentions the murder but does not touch on the other topics. The novel opens with a bit of snarky back-and-forth between Truman Capote and the Millionaire’s Wife of the title (Ann Woodward), establishing that the two are not on friendly terms. She allegedly uses a slur about his lifestyle (Truman Capote was openly gay) to describe him, and he calls her “Mrs. Bang Bang” […]

The Past is a Different Country

Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age by Reid Mitenbuler

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Peter Freuchen first rose to prominence as an Arctic explorer in the early twentieth century, but during his long adventurous life he wore many other hats, becoming a best-selling author, working in Hollywood, and being imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp for being a member of the resistance. I like exploration stories. They introduce you to an old world that no longer exists, they have the kinds of details that boggle the mind, and are usually populated with exactly the eccentric kinds of people you’d […]

Many Truths, No Lies

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

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I knew next to nothing about Cleopatra going into this one. I know she lead Egypt at some point and had an affair with Marc Antony and that all of this caused a Mediterranean kerfuffle in the time of the Roman Empire. But I couldn’t say what her power was or what era she lived in or any of that. I couldn’t even guess, not even taking material from the wildly inaccurate plays and movies about her as I’ve seen none. So it felt good […]



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