Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Amerigo!? Heck no!

The Letters of America Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career by Amerigo Vespucci

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Library Book Bingos exist for two reasons: 1. clearing my shelves of books that would have otherwise sat there and 2. challenging myself to learn new things. I don’t really like the second purpose. I prefer to read what I want to read and that is that. But this summer, all of my local libraries are doing Ocean themed bingos (boring!). One of them required a biography of a seafaring explorer. I knew little about Amerigo Vespucci, the man from which the word “America” likely […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

You are entering the Red Zone. Proceed at own risk. When in doubt, run.

City of Mirrors: A Novel (Book Three of The Passage Trilogy) by Justin Cronin

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I consider myself very lucky that I discovered Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” series only last summer, so the wait for City of Mirrors was much less painful and dramatic than it would have been if I’d been reading in real time: The Passage was published in 2010 and The Twelve in 2012. City of Mirrors came out four weeks ago. That’s not on a George R. R. Martin level, but still could have been a brutal wait for me. Whew! I love this series. I […]



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