Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Her head in the Stars

Comet Chaser: The True Cinderella Story of Caroline Herschel, the First Professional Woman Astronomer by Pamela S Turner

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First, let me get the work stuff out of the way, though it is available, I read Pamela S Turner’s book via an online reader copy.  Overall, Comet Chaser: The True Cinderella Story of Caroline Herschel, the First Professional Woman Astronomer, is a beautiful book. The story is what you expect: in a time when girls were housekeepers, got married and had little to no education, we find Herschel as a child, watch her grow and finally see the woman she would become. She is […]

Beyond the Wall

Berlin Game by Len Deighton

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My wife and I honeymooned in Berlin. A lot of folks are surprised by this but we’re not beach people. We like to explore histories, interesting cultural icons, the unusual. Berlin was perfect for that. We had a great nine days there and it was a good start to our marriage. Berlin is sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of a city: a pastiche of prewar romanticism, total ruin, capitalist-western occupation and totalitarian communist occupation make up a sort of fascinating urban landscape. It is doing […]

Just when you think you know everything…

The Girl From Guernica by Karen Robards

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I don’t recall why any longer, but the other day something sent me down a Kindle rabbit hole search for a specific Karen Robards book. There was a point in time when Ms. Robards was an automatic purchase for me – if I saw a new book on the rack at the grocery store or at Barnes & Noble, in the basket it went. Like many authors from the late 90s and early aughts for which I had this habit, she kind of fell off […]

The gal who moved wooden mice

Cut!: How Lotte Reiniger and a Pair of Scissors Revolutionized Animation by C. E. Winters

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From Kirkus review: The creator of the world’s oldest surviving full-length animated film is celebrated in this straightforward biograph I am all for women in history and biographies for kids about women, but when you get the same handful over and over, you get bored. Or at least I do. And then when I find a person that is not like the others, that is in a new area or did something fantastic, and was not the same old, I tend to get terribly excited […]

The Road to Hell

Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris by Ian Kershaw

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Read this as part of CBR15Bingo: Europe. Adolf Hitler’s entire life story takes place in Europe and he, more than any one person, instigated a world war that began in Europe. Many times, Europe is considered a fancy, civilized place and I think we need to own how historically, western Europe has given the world a horrifying amount of barbarism between colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Holocaust.  While far from an expert on Nazi Germany, I perhaps know more about it than the typical […]

Stuck or unstuck in time

Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: The Graphic Novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr and Ryan North

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WTH did I read? I admit, a lot of the graphic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade, went over my head. But that just means I need to read it again as this is not something  that can be taken in all at once. The artwork is what really grabbed me this first reading. There was a lot going on, but it did not always feel “fleshed out” and there were things missing, yet, there was also too much going on as well. The lack […]



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