Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Wait. They Did NOT Just Bury Her Sitting Up.

Blessed Are the Dead by Malla Nunn

by Leave a Comment

Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper was brought up under rough circumstances in the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa.  Although mixed race, he presents as white, and managed as such to serve in the military for South Africa during WWII.  But since then, he has lost and then recovered his white papers in the turbulent years of the beginning of the apartheid period of the 1950s, due to the patronage of the Afrikaner Colonel van Niekirk, for entirely selfish reasons.  And with Cooper comes his best friend, […]

So Apartheid South Africa Was Way More Complicated than Black vs White

Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn

by Leave a Comment

So we are back in the newly segregated apartheid version of South Africa, as formed in the 1950s.  Detective Emmanuel Cooper has had to revert from his former status as WWII vet and (most importantly) white person, to mixed race instead.  But Major van Niekerk (white Afrikaner) has a need for him and his partner and friend, the Zulu Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala, tracker extraordinaire.  A poor young white boy, Jolly Marks, had been found in the port town of Durban, South Africa, near the […]

A Whole New World – At Least to Me

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo TBR This was fascinating, a murder mystery set in a time and place that was unfamiliar to me.  In the early 1950s, South Africa had just entered into its apartheid era.  What had been previously informal, now became rigidly structured by law.  The population was strictly divided between the whites (original Dutch settlers and the mostly English settlers that followed – two distinct groups), the native Africans, and the colored population (for the most part settlers from India and anyone who was of a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo