Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“We must stop confusing bullies with leaders.”

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

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Reading this book puts me in the mind of what I’ve seen on TV of going to one of those televised evangelical church sessions where you pay someone to slap you in the face to cure you of cancer, only instead of a conman trying to steal people’s money, it’s an intelligent woman giving me the words to express frustrations I’ve never been able to properly explain and it is so cathartic it almost  feels like an out of body experience. Plot (yes, I’m calling […]

Anything But

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

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What are we doing—we’re constantly holding up the mediocre white man as the standard and then bending to it at the detriment of good ideas, fairness, and equity. Mediocre is a must read. It was inappropriate to yell “Yes!” after every sentence, but that’s how I felt. In some ways, it’s telling you what you already know, but it’s also explaining how deep the problem really is and also affirming that no, it’s not just you. I remember so clearly arguing with my brother when […]

I would push this book on anyone.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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One of these days I will find a way to successfully and reliably write reviews for books that mean a lot to me, but that is not this day. This day, I’m going to half-ass some things about this awesome book I read last month but have been avoiding reviewing. A thing that I can say with confidence is that the audio version is great. Somehow I’ve never listened to a book narrated by Bahni Turpin before, but she was fantastic, and I hope she […]

More Essential Reading

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power by Ijeoma Oluo

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Best for: All the people, but I think white men really need to read and sit with this one. In a nutshell: Author Oluo explores the ways in which the elevation of the mediocrity of white men harms everyone (including white men). Worth quoting: “What I’m saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” “How can white men be our born […]

This Is The Way

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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With the requisite qualifications that I’m a cishet white dude reviewing this, please take that into consideration when reading. Call outs are, of course, fair game. Like many Americans, I’ve dug into several books on antiracism in the wake of the uprising following George Floyd’s death. I would recommend them all. They all have knowledge and wisdom for these and all times to both address internal attitudes and reform personal politics around racism. None are quantitatively “better” than the other. But if I had to […]



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