Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


These (Slow) Burning Stars

These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs

by 4 Comments

These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs, is a revenge-driven, bloody, action-heavy space opera. It’s full of political intrigue, social commentary, and gun fights. And I thought it was excellent. It was, however, slow to start for me. In fact, I originally started it several months ago and got a little stuck in the first chapter due to all the unfamiliar terminology. The author doesn’t include a glossary, so it was a bit hard for me to keep track at first. That feeling went away after […]

No, but really, everything is connected

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi

by Leave a Comment

Conspiracy theories hit differently depending on where you live in the world. The more outlandish ones; the moon landings were faked, we’re all being ruled by lizard people with orange fake tan; live in the West. In most of the Global South, conspiracy theories about government coups aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re just reality seen through a different lens. Ibram X Kendi’s Chain of Ideas feels a little reading about the Lizard People before you realise that, no, this IS how the far-right have come back […]

But We Dream Different Dreams

The Last Boleyn by Karen Harper

by Leave a Comment

Though it is Anne Boleyn who became the second queen of Henry VIII, her sister Mary had her own entanglements with royalty which in many ways paved the way for the rise of the Boleyns. Philippa Gregory retreads this same ground some two decades later, but my understanding is that The Last Boleyn is a more restrained retelling of this already dramatic story. I thought that Harper did an excellent job of fleshing out all the many historical figures which people this book, including members of both […]

Iceland Presents…. Ms. President

Vigdis: A Book About the World's First Female President by Rán Flygenring

by Leave a Comment

We are always talking about “we need more women in politics.” Well, we are just not looking in the right places. In 1980 Iceland elected its first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. And the book Vigdis: A Book About the World’s First Female President by Rán Flygenring shows us the background of that historical event. Not only was she the first of Iceland she is considered the first woman to be democratically elected president in 1980 (Isabel Perón of Argentina was the first woman president in […]

The American Female Q

In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked by Jonna Méndez

by Leave a Comment

Jonna began her work at the CIA as a ‘career wife,’ supporting her husband’s job, but soon she started taking on bigger and important roles in the agency, for which she lived all over the world and eventually rose to the position of Chief of Disguise. Having read plenty about the CIA’s origins as the OG old boy’s club in which a lot of men threw ideas at a wall and hoped they’d stick during World War 2, this book was interesting to me for […]

We’re all just screaming into an algorithmic void

Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar

by 2 Comments

  I recently rewatched The Social Network. Fifteen years on, it stands as a digital autopsy for the birth of “Tech Bro” culture and the death of nuanced debate. The subsequent rise of Facebook, Twitter, and their algorithm-driven culture wars has accelerated societal conversation away from material inequality and toward the friction of identity politics. In her first book, Ash Sarkar encourages us to look beneath this noise at the deeper fractures of class. She rightly argues that identity politics has a vital place in […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo