Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Queen of the Nile

Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth by Francine Prose

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Francine Prose tells the story of Cleopatra (VII Philopater, if you want to be specific), her entanglement with the Roman Empire, and how she has become distorted in cultural depictions after her death. In a way, I am reading this book in preparation – I’ve got the reading of a retelling of Cleopatra’s life set in space (!) coming up, and I figured that I’d appreciate it more if I gave myself a better grounding of the historical subject matter first. Also, I’ve always found […]

This artist made me want to see the world

The Illustrators: Miroslav Sasek by Martin Salisbury

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Cbr14bingo Minds I think this review fits the category since the book explores the life and work of artist Miroslav Sasek. It is the story of a creative mind. When I was little, my parents kept our books in a cupboard right outside my bedroom. I used to sneak out after bedtime, grab some books and bring them back into my room to read. Among those books were several of Miroslav Sasek’s “This Is …” travel books for children. I loved them and still have […]

Less about Mozart’s starling than the author’s starling, but still interesting

Mozart's Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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CBR BINGO 14: Bird, because there is a bird on the cover and it tells the story of a bird (two, in fact!) Although the bird didn’t appear in the movie Amadeus, Mozart owned a starling during three of the most productive years of his life, the time period when he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, eight piano concertos, and three symphonies. To be able to tell the story of Mozart’s Starling effectively, author Lyanda Lynn Haupt adopted a starling of her own. This book is a […]

Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness

Three Pianos by Andrew McMahon

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The first concert my fiancee took me to was one for somebody I’d never heard of before: Andrew McMahon. She told me he’d survived leukemia, and they had a Dear Jack Foundation table out front where you could sign up to be a bone marrow donor. I wound up having a good time, but I didn’t know how complicated a persona that man at the piano really was until I read the book he released late last year. When I began, I naively thought that […]

The Very Worst Theatre Kids You Know

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux

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  Part of the reason I decided to pick up I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche was its premise: most books written about Friedrich Nietzsche tend to focus on the man’s writings and philosophy first, and then the man second. If at all. But this is not the case for Sue Prideaux’s biography, which had—I thought at least—a rather philosophically ambivalent and somewhat apolitical blurb. This kind of took me by surprise, so into the shopping-cart it went. I was quite delighted by […]

A Family History

Seven Aunts by Staci Lola Drouillard

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Author Drouillard tells the history of her family in recent generations through the lives of her seven aunts, four on her mother’s side and three on her father’s. I’ve always been interested in family histories, because no two are the same – that, and that there are generally a lot of secrets to uncover and I am a nosy sort of person. The fact that Seven Aunts is so wholeheartedly focused on the lives of the women in the family, tracing their parallels and divergences, made it […]



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