Social justice warrior alert: this was a really tough one, and also should be mandatory reading. I grew up in Canada, and stories about the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad have always been fairly romantic to me: good and caring citizens resisted the status quo and helped shuttle slaves from town to town until they were safely out of harm’s way in the North, often fabulous Canada where we were the cooler (haha) neighbor, and where former slaves could habeas their own damn […]
Outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned….
I’ve long been interested in the American presidency. I’ve read, perhaps, more about the various men to have served that role than any other particular historical subject. Over the last 2+ years participating in the Cannonball, I’ve read about 20 biographies of various presidents. I have books on the office itself, not just the men who’ve sat in it. I’ve read countless articles and think pieces. And in all of this, Jefferson Davis, one and only president of the Confederate States of America, is never […]
Just because you can write a 1000 page book doesn’t mean you have to…
El laberinto de los espíritus (literally, The Labyrinth of the Spirits) is the fourth book in the saga of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. This saga started in 2001 with The Shadow of the Wind, followed by The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. All three books take place in Barcelona, in the aftermath of the Civil War. If you are not familiar with them, I recommend you get your hands on a copy of The Shadow of the Wind […]
Vignettes of inequity
One of the difficulties of studying history lies in the inherent tendency of people to not see themselves as playing a small role in a larger story. We are all the center of our own universe, after all, so it’s hard to remember that everything isn’t actually revolving around our own brilliance. Our actions are our own, but they make up a part of the larger trajectory of human progress. In studying history, the goal is to compose these fine details into a larger picture […]
A Graveyard Where Nothing Stays Buried
So, turns out some of those Civil War reenactors aren’t just pretending. I’ve never lived below the Mason-Dixon line, so this book is a bit of a shock. Confederates in the Attic is Tony Horwitz’s first-person account of his journey through the South, exploring Civil War battlefields, visiting memorials and museums, and taking part in reenactments with a “hard-core” group (hard-core here meaning they throw away the apple he wanted to eat because that particular kind didn’t exist in the 1860s, confiscate his sleeping roll, […]
Big skies, big animals, big threats
By the time I started reading Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, I had forgotten what it was about, and I’m glad I had because otherwise, I would have had my defensives up. I added it to my library queue after reading badkittyuno’s review last month. Cannonball Read: the system works. There’s not much I can add here. badkittyuno did a killer job summarizing the experience of the read, and the broad strokes of the story that Alexander Fuller tells. It’s a memoir of […]
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