Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: Racism

“When you get older, you may never have anyone sing to you personally again, but go all over the world and I bet you can’t find one baby that has never been sung to.”

The Good Times Are Killing Me by Lynda Barry

by Leave a Comment

Lynda Barry’s other near-perfect YA novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me, marks my completing re-reading her non comics work, as I read and reviewed Cruddy last year. I do think Cruddy is a singular work of genius, but this novel is a close second and one that I find deeply moving and beautiful. It’s a short book, only 131 pages, but Barry manages to pack a lot of emotion and layered, thoughtful commentary on growing up, friendship, systemic societal racism, and the power of […]

“How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This is how.”

by Leave a Comment

A very good and heartbreaking book to start the year with. Lemn Sissay’s powerful memoir My Name Is Why details his time in British foster care and shows the casual cruelty of the authoritarian system he was placed in. He had to fight the government for thirty years to get access to his records and he uses the paper trail of comments by his social worker, reports on his progress, and other pieces of the puzzle to show the gaps in the record and how […]

might not be the book you think it is, but it might be the book you need

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang

by 4 Comments

Man oh man do people dislike this book! And when they do, they seem to dislike it for all sorts of suspicious reasons. Oh, white/western person, do you think the main characters in this book, the majority of whom are from colonies, spend a little bit too much time griping about the evils of the British colonial empire? Well then, boy do I have some news that’s going to REALLY disturb you about non-fictional humans in the real world who were once subjugated by the […]

Amazing and emotional

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds

by Leave a Comment

This book is so phenomenal and heart wrenching and absolutely perfect. I found it utterly unputdownable and love Avery, Simone, Zora, Carole, and Mama Letty so much. When Avery’s mom learns of her mom’s cancer diagnosis and that it’s probably the end for her, the Anderson family packs up and moves from DC to Bardell, Georgia. Avery wants to find a way to fix things between her mom and Mama Letty before her death, but that’s hard to do when grappling with a history of […]

“Our myths have not served us well.”

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

by 4 Comments

I don’t imagine this will be a long review, not because the work doesn’t deserve it, and not because there wasn’t plenty to discuss during our book club earlier this fall, but because after spending months with this work, I don’t know how much more brain space I can give it. In a not insignificant way, I need to be done with this work for now. This book is a discussion. Its various contributors are providing context, new or more in-depth analyses of how so […]

The Talk we all need

The Talk by Alicia D. Williams

by Leave a Comment

cbr14bingo Elephant Level 2 & 3  Unfortunately, there is a large elephant in The Talk. One that is so large that we never actually hear what it is, but is as plain as the trunk on its face. It is The Talk black families will give to their sons when they start reaching certain milestones. The milestones that make other people look at them, but not in a positive way. And I am sadly sure that Alicia D. Williams and Briana Mukodiri Uchendu have given […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo