Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Three friends, a revolution, and (for me) a look at our literary biases

Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning

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Last year came and went with the stillness of a thrashing fish out of water — I certainly don’t need to recap what an astoundingly not-normal year 2020 was. We were all just doing our best, gasping for air while picking up new hobbies to distract ourselves from the pandemic, racial injustice, the world ending, etc. And this is where I let you non-Asia readers in on a secret: While the US and Europe played cat-and-mouse with the virus (seriously, does anyone really know what […]

Genghis Khan: A guy from a long time ago who was very important. I know some things about him now!

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

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Ultimately I really enjoyed this audiobook. Audiobooks as a format really help me to absorb nonfiction books, particularly ones that I would normally have trouble taking the time to concentrate on. And this was a pretty fascinating book. I knew next to nothing about Genghis Khan, the Mongols, this period in history, or the cultures of the people who lived in this area. After reading the book I know a little! Firstly, Genghis Khan wasn’t even his name! His name was Temüjin. Genghis and Khan […]

Hubris is the name of the game.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson

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This was just an okay read for me. A narrative non-fiction account of the hurricane in 1900 that was one of the most destructive in American history, Isaac’s Storm is really a feat of research and documentation. It’s clear Larson did his homework. It just never really grabbed me, until it did grab me but in a very unpleasant way. Larson painstakingly accounts the days leading up to the hurricane, mostly focusing on Isaac Cline, who headed up the Galveston, TX branch of the weather […]

Blood in the streets

Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury

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Gangs of New York is exactly the sort of book that I’d like to use to beat some sense into the types of people always looking back fondly to the ‘good old days’ (which are always much better when seen through rose-tinted glasses and presume that the person looking back would have been a rich, white man to elevate themselves above all the shit),  a comprehensive look at the many, many stampings, stabbings, robberies, murders, riots and much more perpetrated by the incredible and vast […]

More work to be done

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts was our Mocha Girls Read book club selection in June. It became a very timely selection after the horrible death of George Floyd, which shone a brighter light on Black Lives Matter activism in America. As a Black woman, I was suffering from emotional exhaustion during that time. This history book actually helped put so many current things in perspective. We have come a long way, […]

Putting Black women back into the historical narrative.

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

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This was a really good book for what it was—a survey of Black women’s roles throughout 400 plus years of North American history—but the relatively small 219 page count just wasn’t enough space to really get into the sorts of details I really love when reading about history. I don’t think we can discount the impact of the purpose of the book, though, since its entire aim is to place Black women back into the historical record, and it very much succeeds in that goal. […]



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