Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

“He had been defying us all. Yet there was nobody in the court who did not look superior to him.”

Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, The British Voice of Nazi Germany by Rebecca West

by Leave a Comment

Radio Treason was originally a series of New Yorker dispatches from Rebecca West, covering the trial for treason of William Joyce, who was a radio propagandist for the Nazis nicknamed “Lord Haw-Haw.” This book is a reissue of these columns into one book, which is unfortunately and depressingly extremely of the moment. I had a lot of moments of recognition and sadness reading this as to how little things have changed in terms of the small minded and pathetic nature of Fascists. West details the trial and […]

Rebecca West (1)

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

by Leave a Comment

“There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my Mamma and Papa were ever going to speak to each other again.” At times, this is one of the funniest novels I have ever read. It’s slightly overlong at times, and given that there’s two more books in the series, I don’t think that’s going to change. The book is a roman a clef by way of a bildungsroman. I don’t know how much of it directly based on Rebecca West’s life, but if […]

Blackout (of a character and on the bingo card)

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

by 1 Comment

Cbr14bingo Gaslight/Bingo Blackout  Action takes place during and in decades prior to WWI. A couple of characters struggle to believe the truth and question each other’s reliability. The Return of the Soldier is a novella that exposes the iniquities of Britain’s class system against the backdrop of World War I. It is a heartbreaking love story that focuses on the women in one soldier’s life as he convalesces following an unusual injury in France. This story features four main characters. The injured soldier, Captain Chris […]

The idea of a traitor first became real to the British of our time when they heard the voice of William Joyce on the radio during the war.

The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West

by Leave a Comment

This is a revised edition of a book that came out not that long after WWII had ended and was revisited about 20 years later when the geopolitical situation surrounding the concept of treason further shifted from the politics of fascism and democracy to one of the Cold War logic of communism and democracy (and I know that communism is an economic system, but meaning here the authoritarian governments under communist regimes in Soviet Union, and within time China and North Korea, although the book […]

Puzzled, he silently mumbled.

Harriet Hume by Rebecca West

by Leave a Comment

This is a British novel from 1928 by the writer Rebecca West, most well known for The Return of the Solider, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (a 1400 page diary/journal through Eastern Europe), The Birds Fall Down, and The Fountain Overflows. I have only previously read The Return of the Soldier and recall more about the physical object of the book itself than the story (it was a first edition from 1917 that my library had in the stacks, so it was really neat, and […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo