Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

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This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]

He had taken in the country, and in his eyes and his mind it had been changed, marked by his own individuality, and made part of him.

Out of Africa by Isak Denison

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #1: Books from different countries. In between a lot of privileged nonsense, it is a love letter to Africa.)After reading Paula McClain’s Circling The Sun last year, I was not finished with the characters. So, I picked up this book to learn a little more about the real-life folks that inspired that historical fiction. This is a classic that I had never read, made into a famous movie, that I have never seen. Well trod territory here, but I’ll give it a go. A Danish […]

Gripping story of resilience

Hostage by Guy Delisle

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CBR15Passport books from different countries Hostage is the true story of Christophe Andre, a Frenchman working for Doctors Without Borders in Chechnya who was kidnapped and held for three months. Guy Delisle, a French illustrator and writer, interviewed Andre after his ordeal and turned the taped interviews into a gripping work of graphic biography.  In order to place things in context I had to read up a bit on the Chechen/Russian war of 1994-96. The events in this story take place after that conflict had […]

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander

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Do you ever read a book’s marketing summary after finishing a book and wonder what in the world they’re going on about? The teaser for “Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World” by William Alexander starts off like this: “The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Stored in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, appropriated as wartime propaganda, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato is the Rodney Dangerfield of foods. Yet, […]

A Few Squirts of a Turkey Baster

Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings by Chrysta Bilton

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: New to you authors #1 Chrysta and her sister are the daughters of a dynamic and damaged woman, a single lesbian who yearned for a child in the rather unaccepting 1980s – and found her ideal sperm donor in a hair salon. But both Debra and Jeffrey hid many secrets from their children. There’s that oft-quoted opening sentence of Anna Karenina – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I thought of that quote, and how […]

Remember the nothing class of Home Ec? Turns out it’s got a past.

The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger

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What do chemistry, business, politics, and social justice have in common? I’m betting that no one would have automatically though “Home Economics!” but that’s exactly what The Secret History of Home Economics show. It all started with Catharine Beech, Olivia Washington (3rd wife of Booker T.), and Ellen Swallow in the late 1800s where educational opportunities for women were few and far between. By contextualizing studying chemistry as women as a way to develop better household practices, these ladies and more like them developed one […]



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