Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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These kites fly without wind

Flying Kites: A Story of the 2016 California Prison Hunger Strike by Stanford Graphic Novel Project

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Regardless of personal feelings of the legal system, or the rights/privileges you feel a prisoner deserves due to crimes committed verses what we would consider an “innocent confinement,” this graphic novel, Flying Kites: A Story of the 2016 California Prison Hunger Strike by the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, is an eye-opening piece of literature. The Stanford Project chooses a subject of importance, and recently, they choose one that would highlight one of the largest hunger strikes the California prison system had seen. It would shine […]

A monumental achievement that mostly worked like I thought it would

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

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I was shocked to see that this book had only been reviewed one time for Cannonball Read. My cultural frame of reference for this show is that it came out before my time, was one of the biggest shows in the history of television. The show premiered in January of 1977 and Part I garnered a 40.5 share. The show was aired over the course of a single week because CBS was afraid it was going to be a bust, and preferred one bad week […]

Even the greatest of us may be blind

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

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Booker T. Washington was born into slavery sometime around 1856. Following emancipation, he and his family moved to West Virginia to be with his mother’s husband, an escaped slave. He taught himself to read, and was able to attend school through perseverance and hard work. Working in coal mines and salt furnaces, he was eventually able to go to Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) for higher education. In 1881, Samuel Armstrong, Hampton Institute president, recommended Washington to be the leader of the new Tuskegee Normal […]

Ms. Desmond, you’re the wrong color to be sitting there

Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged! by Jody Nyasha Warner

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This is not a 5 because it is the best book ever. It is very good, but it is not my favorite book. However, it is a 5 because it is talking about history in a time, place and about a gender we donot hear a lot about. We learn about a woman of color who sat down for her rights and the rights of every black Canadian. And in a way, she stood up (by sitting) for people of color everywhere. To see a […]

Who Was…. Part two

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Yes, I have mentioned the Who Is/Who Was series before, but I have several of the titles and could not let good reads go to waste! This time: Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.? and Who Was Barack Obama? and Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Charles Darwin are the “newest” ones devoured. Of course, pairing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama is natural. Two men of color who broke racial barriers. But why pair Earhart and Darwin, too? Earhart broke down barriers, too, […]

Where did this pie come from? Nowhere, my friend, nowhere.

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The unsung heroes of a story are just as important (or more so sometimes) then the ones that get their names in the history books. And Georgia Gilmore did a very important thing: she put food into the tummies of people. An army cannot go far on an empty stomach and when the people of Montgomery, Alabama were walking to work and places instead of taking the bus, she helped by selling her pies. She helped make lunches. She gave her home for secret meetings […]



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