Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search this Site

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo

by Leave a Comment

CBR17 Bingo: N – Re: the title. The obsessive collector in history has worn many faces – a magician, a scientist, a connoisseur, a madman – but whether they are a force for good or evil in their societies is a more complicated question. When I think of collectors I usually think of the modern kind who collects some specific category of kitsch because they like them, be it stuffed animals or porcelain figurines or Stephen King novels. As someone who dislikes clutter and has […]

You are all Dead Spirits

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People by Darren Rix; Craig Cormick

by Leave a Comment

So as a school kid in Australia back in the nineties, I remember being taught, like many of my peers, the Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? To add all the qualifiers, Cook and his crew are probably best described as the first set of Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia …after the dutch sort of poked around in the west.  But very little discussion time was given to the people that had lived in Australia for tens […]

Who has the right to history?

The Memory Hunters by Mia Tsai

by Leave a Comment

The Memory Hunters fulfills the “red” square for CBR17 Bingo. I really enjoyed Mia Tsai’s Bitter Medicine, and was very excited to try The Memory Hunters, which is a completely new world and setting. It is set in a type of near future where climate change has resulted in much of the coast as we know it being devastated and swallowed by the ocean and storms, and fungi being used as a way to collect and remember history. It opens when Kiana Strade, a memory […]

“She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

In Pursuit of Love: A Journey in the Footsteps of Obsession by Mark Bostridge

by Leave a Comment

CBR17 Bingo: I – Re: the title. Victor Hugo was the most famous writer in the world when his daughter, Adèle, left their home in Guernsey on a years-long mad pursuit of a former lover. Centuries later, author Mark Bostridge retraces her steps and tries to understand her obsession in the prism of his own life. I have not seen acclaimed 1975 film The Story of Adele H., so this was my first real acquaintance with the strange life of Adèle Hugo, whose story was […]

The Past Is a Different Country

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris

American Monsters by Adam Jortner

by 2 Comments

CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind. The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin. This book is […]

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

by 3 Comments

CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo