Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Women mind your business.

Courageous Cowgirls: Women Who Rode the Trails, Ran Ranches, and Raced in Rodeos by Sue Young and Katie Howerton

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Why yes. Yes, women should mind their own business. Especially if you are one of the women in this book that could and would barrel ride, cattle drive, steal back horses and guns, not to mention run chuck wagons and their own cattle businesses. In Courageous Cowgirls: Women Who Rode the Trails, Ran Ranches, and Raced in Rodeos you see women who did this and more (though stealing back your husband’s gun and your cattle a few hundred at time is impressive enough). This book […]

“Anybody who spends a lot of time burrowing through primary records of the old South is going to find almost anything they can imagine & more than a little that they never imagined.”

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely

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When people think of slavery in the American South, they usually imagine vast, intensely segregated plantations. However, usually Black people and their White enslavers lived cheek by jowl, and this terrible intimacy could give rise to many different kinds of tensions, as demonstrated by the six court cases covered in this book. Most of what I know about slavery in the United States was learned in the long ago days of high school and before, so I chose to pick up this book to both […]

“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.”

James by Percival Everett

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I heard from multiple people that James was THE BOOK to read last year, and it was on a lot of best of lists, so I was exicted to give it a read. It fully hooked me from the first sentence “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” I didn’t have a lot of expectations about this book, but having me chuckle from the start was a surprise. This is a retelling of the classic tale Huck Finn but from the […]

Three-Four-One

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Despite the backlash due to Coates’ writing and speeches on his time in Palestine, there are really three narratives in this travelogue. The Palestine one is the third one and it’s the one I’m going to spend as little time as possible on because I don’t want this page to be a forum on what’s happening there right now. I actually think the best essay here is the first one, where Coates finds himself in Dakar, Senegal. He has written at length about the rejection […]

“Our bodies, by their very nature, resist control, a fact that always has felt paradoxically triumphant when I encounter it.”

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

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Everyone has a butt, and most everyone accords them more thought and meaning than they do many other parts of their body. But why do we pay them so much attention? How have they come to be so fraught with connotation? I remember seeing this book on NetGalley ages back, but forgot that I wanted to read it until I read Travis_J_Smith’s review last week. This proves I have a terrible memory, because who could forget that cover? I’ve been feeling like reading a micro-history […]

How many ways are there to be tacky?

The Tacky South by Katherine A. Burnett, Monica C. Miller

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Popular scholarship seems to be kind of a newer genre; by this I mean essays by trained scholars that are scaled back a bit in terms of scope and depth, and done in styles that people without academic inclinations might find readable. Often, these kinds of works also tend to be on subject of interest to the general public that have something to do with popular culture. The Tacky South is one such collection. The authors of the various essays use sometimes rather different definitions […]



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