Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I couldn’t put it down

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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Many Cannonballers have already reviewed Homegoing, and I doubt I’m going to add any profound insights with my own review. Long story short, I thought this book was amazing. I wish I’d read it much sooner. Homegoing is a family saga, starting with two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, in 18th-century Ghana who don’t know the other exists. Each chapter alternates between their descendants. Effia is married off to a white man from England and lives a fairly luxurious life in a fort, while unbeknownst to her, her […]

Perhaps the most American of novels.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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In 1905, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was published to massive sales and widespread scorn. The book was supportive of segregation, and glorified not only the Confederacy, but the Klan it was purporting to tell the story of. One year later, mobs of white Atlantans massacred African Americans following lurid and unfounded accusations made in local newspapers about the alleged rape of four white women at the hands of black men. At least 25 black people were murdered […]

Lest We Forget

I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: history-banned. Although this book hasn’t been banned (yet), it goes into great length on the oral testimonies of the victims and survivors of racial terror during Reconstruction. The narratives of slaves and post-emancipation Black persons are being banned across the country in other media. I can’t remember who tweeted it but someone once wrote a hypothesis that anti-Semitism is on the rise again because so many Holocaust survivors are dying. Reading that hit me like a thunderbolt because it made […]

History is Made by Persistence and Knowing the Right People

A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton & the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates

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Clara Barton is one of those historical figures that sits as a vaguely understood fact in my mind. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about her existence, but beyond being the founder of the American Red Cross, she never bore much significance to me. But then I wrote a little article about visiting small historical sites and the “Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office” came up in my search. A cursory perusal of the website had me fascinated, and I needed to know […]

Escaping Slavery Is the Least Interesting Thing About Him

The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson & the Story that Sparked the Civil War by Jared Brock

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My boss ordered a free desk copy of The Road to Dawn for his class, and when it didn’t arrive on time, he bought it himself. As usually happens, the desk copy ended up arriving at the same time as the Amazon book, and he gave me the free copy. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf behind my desk at work for four years and I’ve never cracked the cover. It’s not that it didn’t interest me, but more that I put it away and […]

The Re-Birth of a Nation (and what came after…)

Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois

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I had been meaning to tackle this legendary W.E.B. Du Bois’ tome for years, finally deciding to do it this month. It wasn’t what I expected, in many ways. Those expectations came with my own ignorance in not knowing a lot of Du Bois’ work. I’d read little of him before getting to this. I knew that despite his status amongst the Black intellectuals and historians of his time, he was outcast near the end of his life for leaving the NAACP because of his […]



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