Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Crimes Against Our Own Humanity

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven R. Scott

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I’ve spent a career at the margins of politics, learning a lot about how people interact and how the most insignificant seeming interaction can have massive ripple effects and how political discourse flows in certain directions, mainly towards fear. It’s a world of real-politik which can best described with the world-weary quote from Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.” Nowhere is this more evident than in George Takei (Yes, Sulu from Star Trek)’s graphic novel rendition of his […]

Zumrat Dawut

I Escaped a Chinese Internment Camp by Zumrat Dawut and Anthony Del Col

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While I wanted more from I Escaped a Chinese Internment Camp, this graphic novel is an interesting introduction to the people of  Xinjiang (an autonomous region in China) and how they have been treated by the Chinese government. Many women, among them  Zumrat Dawut, have been and are being persecuted because of their faith. Dawut is a Mulsim woman, a wife and a mother of three. She tells her story to Anthony Del Col and the United Nations Human Rights Council through interviews. There is […]

Actor, activist, and author

My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story by George Takei

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Named after an English king, he would go on and represent Asian Americans in Hollywood and beyond. Some know him as the “Oh my!” guy, some know him as a human and GLBTQ+ rights advocate, some know him as a playwright, but most probably know him as Mr. Sulu on Star Trek. His name is George Takei. He would live through several years of some of the worst American history during World War II. While we were fighting for Liberty in Europe and Japan, we […]

We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed.

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This was such a beautifully researched work of fiction, it almost feels wrong not to categorize it as a biography. The book can’t be discussed without discussing its use of the first person plural, as in “Some of us read this book. Some of us only looked at it. Some of us never even heard of it.” It’s an unusual choice, and I could certainly see where it could get old. It’s a very slim book and for me, it was just starting to show some […]

Our Shame and Dishonor

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Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. This first novel from Julie Otsuka deals with the period of time that follows her second novel. The Buddha in the Attic told the story of the Japanese American experience from arrival in California at the turn of the century until the forced deportation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during WWII. When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of one family, from the days just preceding their departure from California to a camp in […]



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